In the industry, VmWare has taken over the Data Center. Server Consolidation has been going on for a while. Multiple servers
that used to run on dedicated hardware, are now Virtual Machines, multiple setting on one rack or blade server. Its not uncommon to see 10's to 100's of virtual server running on one physical server. This has resulted in great cost saving, easy upgrades, easier provisioning, and a reduction of power consumption. This technology is proven, and works.

To give you a example, before VmWare, it would take a week to get a quote, get the approvals for purchase, then another week for delivery, and then a day to set it up, install the OS, and then your ready to start thinking about putting a application on the server. You also had to worry about backup, and KVM (Keyboard and monitor switching).

With VmWare, I log into VmCenter, create a new Virtual machine, selecting how much memory and CPU I need, and pointing it to a ISO image of the OS. And Say Go. The new machine "boots" up, and starts installing the OS. Since a Dell Blade, or 1U server could support upwards of 32 machine, the physical act of buying hardware is reduced significantly. The reality is, most servers are under-utilized, and VmWare lets us use these otherwise wasted resources better.

Another layer of this puzzle is high-availability. We really dont want our applications to go down. It doent matter if its a DHCP server, or a Oracle Database, being up means people are working, and having a hardware issue can really spoil your day when you manage 100's of servers, and almost as many applications. The answer to this is has a few components.

First, we break the Storage component using iSCSI into a separate device. The RAID is now a external device we talk to over TCP/IP using SCSI over our ethernet connections. With 10Gig Ethernet, and hardware based switching, IP is the fastest SAN. Most blade give us 4 1-Gig links which allows 512Megabytes a second of capacity for getting data in and out. This concept means our blades or rack based servers now have no disk locally.

This separation means we can now migrate any virtual machine into any physical cpu, using what VmWare calls vMotion. So if you want to pull a blade server, and replace memory, or reprogram its bios, you can use VmCenter to move a running virtual machine to another physical cpu, without the application even knowing it. In the event of a failure the VM can be run on any physical CPU available. Also Snapshots can be taken, and the allows a virtual ghost type functionality where we can take a virtual photo of what is running, and go back to it at any time.

In the above example, it could have been even easier. In that you load your server-os into a VM, do your patching and updates, then convert it into a template. After you have a template, you can then create more servers using it by just cloning it, and giving it a new name.

None of this so far is new. I've been doing this for a whle. The next step is called VmView.

In manufacturing for example, its not uncommon that you need PC near or in the production areas. So for example lets say we need 320 PC to handle our ERP or SAP type application. These would be scattered over a large area of factory floor. The condition in a factory are not office environment. Heat, Temp, and Humidity are not comfortable for the workers, and worse for the equipment. There are other problems with this approach. 1) Updates - While WSUS and Microsoft tries to automate this, all to often you end up walking to every pc. 2) Security - USB Drives, Thumb Drives, CD-ROM, Phones, and Ipod are all avenues for data leakage, as well as virus to come into the system. The solution is a thin-terminal.

Traditionally with thin-terminals, you need a terminal-server. A terminal server gives you a shared environment to run your applications. This works reasonably well, but not every application can install in such a shared environment. Forcing us back to the common pc approach. With VmView, we can now apply the same technology from the DataCenter to the desktop.

We can create one or more template machines, that are automatically created, re-used, removed or restored that run in the data-center. We can choose what USB devices are connected to the VM on the fly. This allows us to support scanners, barcode guns, rfid readers, and printers that are connected via thin-terminals to the VM in the data-center.

To give a example. For 320 Users we could put those on six M905 Dell Blades. Each user would be allocated a 20Gig Virtual hard disk. Using templates, the OS and common apps could be shared. We would customize AD to do small roaming profiles to avoide any corruption issue, and re-direct MyDocuments etc to proper file server. Now we can "install" a new pc for a new staff in a minute instead of hours. We can snapshot, audit, and reboot all centrally. We can update and touch every pc in the shop with a script easily. And we can deploy new patches, even change from XP to Vista in minutes.

Even changing the desktop hardware is easy. We buy new servers for VmView. Mount them in the data center, and vMotion them over to the new servers.

Using proper network design, we can have a high-availability redundant solution from server to desktop onto the factory floor that is secure and easy to maintain.

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