Uses for VM in Business network?

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TechieSooner

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Honestly I've yet to run into a situation where I think I'd ever need one.

From a business/server standpoint (not workstations in a VM for testing), what do you all use yours for, and how is it advantageous in your situation to just putting the app or whatnot on a regular system?
 
Have 120 servers running on 11 physical boxes, helped us drastically cut hardware and maint. costs.
 
^^ bingo there you go

VM's ideally allow you to get the MOST out of a system.


Say you have one item running that loves ram, so then your CPU and HD sit idle most of the time, why not put them to work using a VM and some other application...


Now why use a VM vs just install the app, because a VM keeps it seperate....if one app goes down, you dont need to take the entire system off line to fix one program, thus making everything else offline / not availible, you simply work on that VM environment which wont affect any other Vm's and program running on that server.

so imagine 120 server all runing say at %20-to %50 efficiency, imagine the cost of cutting 120 servers down to 11 decent ones... the savings in power, and administration costs drop drastically!
 
We have 4 ESX 3.5 servers (Dell 2950's) and we have around 15-20 VM's per server. Aside from my work computer, I have a VM that I use for software testing, network captures, general network testing.

Hardware costs for us have been dramatically decreased and seeing as how we use ESX, we have a support contract with VMWare if anything goes wrong with any of our ESX servers. So it's definitely a money saver all around.
 
sometimes one poorly written app might require a specific DLL or OCX file to run correctly, but that file say gets updated when another app is installed, so the 2 apps cant be on the same box, but one could be in VM
 
I didnt beleive in VM's at first either, my thought was always "what if a piece of hardware dies in that rig, then everything goes down!"

but like any buisness environment you should already have spares / backups around anyways.

i only have one VM set up so far we we only have 8 servers and most a MySQL db's and the servers arent super fast.
 
TechieSooner said:
Honestly I've yet to run into a situation where I think I'd ever need one.

From a business/server standpoint (not workstations in a VM for testing), what do you all use yours for, and how is it advantageous in your situation to just putting the app or whatnot on a regular system?
Click to expand...

What wouldnt you use it for? VMs were designed for business. Not for workstations or home. Hobbyist use is an afterhtought.

Bringing up servers on demand, reducing hardware footprint by a massive amount, redundancy, etc ,etc. There are an unlimited amount of reasons to have VMs. If you havent had to consider VMs in a business you either dont have a large one, or if you do, you are out of the loop.
 
VMWare is also considered to be a "perfect" system by security vendors. They use VMWare for its encapsulation properties... release a virus onto a VM for testing and it won't get loose unless you let it loose.
 
MrGuvernment said:
I didnt beleive in VM's at first either, my thought was always "what if a piece of hardware dies in that rig, then everything goes down!"

but like any buisness environment you should already have spares / backups around anyways.

i only have one VM set up so far we we only have 8 servers and most a MySQL db's and the servers arent super fast.
Click to expand...

Maintenance mode FTW!

At my office we have 11 fully loaded Dell 1950 2U's, and are running 50 or so servers off of them. We develop software and do network security. VMWare and ESXi allows us to setup and mimic our entire office. It also allows our dev's to test out a piece of code, or structure change. If they blow up the virtual office it wont matter or effect production. Just the same I use it to see what would happen when installing new updates to our Barracuda and Checkpoint fire walls, if they run inside the virtual network, I know it will run on our production network. Really I can't think of anything VMWare isn't useful for besides gaming, and enthusiast related things.
 
virtualization assists quite handily with easing standardization of servers, storage platforms, power, cooling, cabling, etc. the way that it must be deployed naturally lends itself to all of these. however, business continuity also is a large reason many organizations are now looking very serisouly into virtualization. the ability to float a vm between two geographically separated datacenters using CNAs, FCoE switches, FC SAN, Site Recovery Manager, and doing asynchronous replication to a DR hot site that's replicating out the production SAN to tiered disk, then going out to tape via a VCB backup proxy, LAN free during normal business hours is something that was previously not possible.
 
With the exception of the domain controllers and backup server, I run about 8 VMs on two PE2950s.

Alongside not having to futz around with a bunch of machines, my backup scheme for the servers are much easier, simpler and more importantly cheaper. I just backup the VM and that's it.

I use Hyper-V.
 
PE2950s are perfect for VMs, I use them for testing and for testbeds for the programming team. (they tend to srew up XP installs at times)
 
I guess also a plus is I could just copy the VM file around from server to server, if I did want to move to physically different hardware?
 
TechieSooner said:
Honestly I've yet to run into a situation where I think I'd ever need one.

From a business/server standpoint (not workstations in a VM for testing), what do you all use yours for, and how is it advantageous in your situation to just putting the app or whatnot on a regular system?
Click to expand...

- Huge reduction in hardware cost from being able to combine several physical boxes to "one"
- Retaining better encapsulation by not having to run completly unrelated (and possibly intefering) services from the same instance. Also makes updating easier, you only have to worry about the one application working instead of many of them
- High availability through Independance from the hardware. Just move the virtuals on another host without shutting them down. I can even move them to another filesystem on the fly. Having a cluster of VM hosts, two fiber paths and a storage cluster you really start to have few single points of failure.
- Easy testing. Just clone a production environment, change the IP and you can start testing anything with a practically identical system to the one you are about to change.
- Quick deployment. Just have a template and clone new systems out of it. All the initial hardening and configuration is already done, you just have to change the IP and hostname (mainly running Linux virtuals). If somebody asks for a new server I will have it running in less then half an hour without leaving my chair. (including all configuations like backup, monitoring etc).

And a lot of other small benefits.
 
here at work we have two servers that run maybe 10 VMs, and it just allows multiple people access to a piece of software at the same time

Rather then having 10 PC's we have 2, and then jsut purchase 10 liscense keys :)

A LOT cheaper.
 
or you could add in an existing SAN/NAS device into the storage devices configuration, and shut down then VM, and do a migrate from one device to the other, which would move all of the VMs files for you, and you could just discover the VM on the storage device, on the new hardware, and fire it back up. Hell, you could copy the non-running VMs files to a thumbdrive and take it home, if you wanted, although ACE is a good use for this.
 
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