VIRTUALIZE NOW! January 17, 2006
Posted by James Webster in : software, virtualization , trackbackI am becoming ever more convinced that the truly agile enterprise will wholeheartedly embrace virtualization within its IT function. Perhaps this elicits a head-slapping “duh!” from some of you?
Some recent challenges at the day job caused me to consider how virtualization might have saved the day.
Whilst investigating various causes for the problem at hand, one possibility was upgrading the service pack of the application server. However, given the downtime that this would present and the possibility that it might make things worse contributed to our inability to make such a change. Fair enough, its a production environment. But as a developer, I get quickly frustrated by not being able to make changes to see if they have a positive effect. However, were we able to build up a new virtual server with the additional service packs and put it into production we would have minimal downtime (without needing a separate physical box to set up the software on) and should things become FUBAR, we could have easily replaced the previous VM.
Some of the features of VMware’s server products, such as VMotion are truly amazing! Imagine being able to migrate your VM from one physical server to another WHILST IT IS STILL RUNNING. Transparent, of course, to the end users. With the right hardware it is possible using VMware ESX Server. Anyway, this is starting to sound too much like a blatant sales pitch!
BTW, if you haven’t played around with the free VMware Player, do it now!!!! Check out the community-provided VM images; fancy playing around with a virtual install of Asterisk within your host Windows XP machine? VMware can do it.
Also, a great blog about virtualization trends is Alessandro Perilli’s virtualization.info.
Right, that’s all from me!
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