And how do you use them? Just curious, as it seems there are loads of funky things one can do.

I’ve been working on this one project on a VM, so I can install the complex software stack in a neat and tidy manner. I can’t get all the software to play nicely, so it turns out that I can have someone else connect remotely and fix it whilst I’m at home watching telly or doing the garden, or even doing something else on the same physical pc. Cool 🙂

Used extensively on both our dev and production environments.
I was alway suspicious about using it on my production database servers but it seems to be doing it thing so far (not talking about a little system either).

So your DBs are run on VMs – why?

They allow you to flex memory and processing power as and when needed and thin provisioning allows you to increase your disk space as required. We use equalogic SAN’s which allow block level replication for DR.
All in all a game changer.
I’m talking about commercial virtual systems not the Oracle/Vmware freebies but the concepts are similar.

VM on the Cloud?

No our infrastructure is in house.

Ok but flexing memory and cpu etc only makes sense if you are going to use that for something else. If you have many apps running on the same hardware it could work out.. as long as they don’t all want power at the same time.

All the time, thousands of them!
Cloud stuff is okay but when you have your own setup you really make the most of their flexibility.

HP are selling micro servers for cheap with £100 rebate (ends up about £100 total) ideal to get a copy of ESXi on that you can tinker with.

Used them extensively in the past, meant I could run linux as a main work system, and boot up a vm with Windows for the odd occasion I needed to use MS Office.

Please, please no! There’s too much of this and all other forms of this techie stuff at work, please don’t bring it here!

@jamj1974 very true!

Ok but flexing memory and cpu etc only makes sense if you are going to use that for something else. If you have many apps running on the same hardware it could work out.

And why wouldn’t you?

If you virtualise your servers then a) you get access to things like High Availability and Fault Tolerance, and b) you can share resources so you need less hardware overall.

Have you seen VMware fault tolerance in action? It’ll blow your mind. A system is running on a VM host, you can pull the power cord out of the host and… nothing happens, it just keeps going. It’s bloody voodoo.

Need a server? Create one from your templates in minutes!

Hardware crashed? Really? Didn’t notice!

When work decided to send me on a VMWare course a couple of years ago, I thought “yawn”…

How wrong I was*

* I may be a bit of a geek

All of the above. Used for development and now for the operation environment.

I do and the its a pain in the @rse.

XP running on a VM within Linux. Linux is controlled for us and keeps getting updates installed which require a reboot. I then have to spend 20 minutes rebooting two operating systems before i can start working again.

PITA!

I don’t do anything in Linux. I don’t know why we have to have it running. Manager is a techie and likes Linux i think.

Use them all the time for software development – often working on several different branches of the product at the same time so it makes it a lot easier to switch between them without reinstalling the application and source-code each time.

We have loads at work as I’m sure most large enterprises do nowadays. What I’m really interested in is accredited technologies that can work at the switch fabric layer to firewall VM’s off from each other and segregate the hypervisor to provide true air-gap level protection.

No-one is there yet.

We have loads at work as I’m sure most large enterprises do nowadays. What I’m really interested in is accredited technologies that can work at the switch fabric layer to firewall VM’s off from each other and segregate the hypervisor to provide true air-gap level protection.

You want air-gap, stick a bit of air between them. Software is not the way to go.

Superted – where xan you get the HP micro servers with £100 rebate?

It will be.

Firewall vendors already provide virtualised environments on the same piece of tin and have done for years. With next generation really taking off it’s only a matter of time before someone integrates at fabric level into the control structure and gets themselves certified. Probably cisco because they’re already in bed with VMware on the VBlock units and they’re giving demos on how it could be done, in theory.

Previous employer recently implemented a pair of vBlocks to takeover all server duties in Europe. Was quite a setup!

In a (much) smaller way, I make use of Vagrant (vagrantup.com) on a regular basis why is an absolute godsend for manageable, rebuildable VMs for development. I can configure server environments in code and then fire them up as often as I like. Means all your developers can use the same environment, locally.

Rachel

I’ll add a second vote for Vagrant for development, truly wonderful

+1 for vagrant. Also take a look at things like chef, puppet and continuous delivery… Win

Our local primary school IT system uses them. Means we can have good performance from a load of old donated hardware by spending the money on a server to host the VMs instead (we have more computers for the kids to use than most similar schools). It also means we only have one image to update with new stuff rather than loads of separate computers. That and the kids can’t mess up the computer by installing viruses etc., as just reboot and they get a nice clean VM (any changes they make to the system aren’t saved).

Server runs on Centos, providing XP VMs (using OSDVT, which most of you will have never heard of, but it has the advantage of being free).

great things, used them a lot. Still use them for dev stuff as I don’t have spare PC’s lying round. I had Ubuntu, XP, 7 & Fedora running one day trying things out.

There are also cost saving benefits to consider. I believe our power bill dropped vastly once we started cutting down on our physical hardware.

also maintenace and floor space as well as cooling and UPS savings

Aye, hardware support costs shoot down with a virtual farm. Moving 300 servers into three racks was an impressive undertaking for us.

Licensing becomes a bit of a PITA though

I am using them for development images. I will have to investigate the setting up of templates so I can create a new VM for a new project or client. Not quite sure if our Windows licensing will support me distributing them to colleagues though.

Be *very* careful with Oracle when using it on VMWare. It sounds like you won’t be affected by the very scale of things but for big businesses, using Oracle on virtual machines can cost you a huge amount because they’re such nasty, ruthless buggers on the licensing front.

Do people actually still use software that needs licensing???

Rachel

Some people have to. I’ve even paid for Linux (not my own money obviously).

Where are these £100 HP servers?

http://www.ebuyer.com/430446-proliant-microserver-turion-2-2-2gb-250gb-nhpl-sata-lff-in-704941-421

£200, with £100 rebate.

Constantly. Only way I can cross-browser test every I’m working on properly (I’m a Web Developer).

Next year I’ll be moving into my final year at university and so be even more reliant on them for emulating a cluster of servers logging data in order to test my project. Details of that one are being kept with me though 😉

I run mine on my MacMini which handles more than enough for me ATM while still being used as a workstation. Currently specced out with a 2.6 i7, 16GB of RAM and a pair of 256GB SSDs on RAID0 so the VMs boot near instantly. For ones I’m not using regularly or are particularly small I store them on my NAS to keep the data on the Mini minimal.

Cross browser? You know about Browserstack??

Which uses VMs, of course…

Rachel

a pair of 256GB SSDs on RAID0

Either that was a typo or god just killed a kitten.

It sounds like you won’t be affected by the very scale of things but for big businesses, using Oracle on virtual machines can cost you a huge amount because they’re such nasty, ruthless buggers on the licensing front.

Yes we are I am afraid (we are also a reasonably large company, circa €2.8bn turnover) there are ways of clustering which get better value but replicating for DR can be tricky, same with SQL as well.

We use a couple servers at work which have hypervisor installed. Used for creating instances of an IP PBX we sell to many customers. Without the VMware software any reboots become tedious and service affecting for customers. As it is, we can remedy any fault/failure in super quick time. No more tiresome 5 minute reboots for when things go really pear shaped.