Building our virtual environment

At work I’m trying to get my head around our virtualisation, like many companies we have sort of just sprawled as the days went on building new VM’s for almost any request just so we didn’t have to buy any more ‘expensive’ hardware. I have been working with Virtualisation software for the past 4 and a half years, almost from the day I started my current job.

During this period I have worked with VMware, Virtuozzo, Microsoft Virtual PC, Microsoft Virtual Server and of course Hyper-V. Mistakes have been made along the way incorrect configuration, the wrong hardware and plain silly human error.

Yet Virtualisation remains a corner stone of how we operate, I’m not sure we could provide the services we do provide were it not for our Virtualisation platform. I know given the financial climate that we certainly wouldn’t be able to convert all of our VM’s in to physical machines, something which has been suggested in the past due to the ‘big issue’ we face with Virtualisation.

Trust.

Although we rely heavily on Virtualisation Technologies there is a lack of trust in any form of virtualisation from both the developers and the Senior Management. Some of the problems we’ve faced are

• Product X isn’t working in the VM, the Virtual Technology doesn’t work.
• My server is slow, it’s because it is on Virtual Technology.
• I don’t want a Virtual Machine because it will break quicker than a physical server.
• Virtualisation is too complex for my needs, I just need a server.
• Virtualisation can’t do what I need, my needs are too complex.

The support team has worked long and hard to erase these fears but they still persist and will probably continue on for quite some time until everyone realises just how ingrained Virtualisation is in our daily life.

Despite the trust issues the support department find themselves needing to provide a test environment for the developers, what I hope to do over the next few blog entries is

• Describe our current set up.
• Describe what we’re trying to achieve.
• Describe what we’re going to do to get there.
• Try and figure out what we can do about the trust issue.