Is it the right time to virtualize?

Re: Has a Blog Bot kicked in?.....

I, too, had to check the date.

Re: Has a Blog Bot kicked in?.....

Glad it's not just me.

"Is it the right time to virtualize?" - er... no... that time was about 10 years ago, mate.

To me that's at least three hardware cycles, servers and clients.

Sure, network virtualisation is still a bit "what's that?" to most places, so I can understand not touching it. But servers - yes. Storage? Depends. Most people don't do a lot of storage, but the article is aimed at datacentre (or so it says).

But "should you be virtualising your old crusty servers?" Hell yes. Unless you are in HPC or similar, of course you should. You should have been doing it for YEARS already.

Re: Not always

VM's migrate. Physical servers don't. You can send them to another datacentre, onto a server you've never touched before and it'll work and keep running like you'd never switched it off. That's a real bonus that you hope you'll never have to utilise.

VM's make better use of server resources. All those "spare" VM's that aren't actually doing anything can sit idle on servers that ARE doing lots of other things. That stupid VM sucking up Gbs of RAM for no real purpose or usage can be pushed back to swap while the ones that need it can use the hypervisor's real RAM. Few things use a lot of CPU - Exchange uses almost nothing, so it can co-exist with VM's that are CPU-heavy, but IO-light.

Additionally, yes, VM backups are SO MUCH NICER. No more faffing by cherry-picking system state items and hoping that you can replicate the config should that fancy network card blow up and you need to put it on something else. Just backup "the machine", with every configuration on it and every setting and snapshots of the historical settings. Done.

VM's also snapshot and replicate: snapshot the live server, spin up the replica in a test environment, play with ALL the settings and break things, and know you can roll-back to known-good instantly even if you made a mistake. Sometimes in seconds. And being able to "splice and test" like that is invaluable. "What WOULD happen if we upgraded that primary server to the next version of Windows?" - don't guess... do it... see what happens, just by branching from a snapshot of that EXACT server. Delete it when you're done, or push it back into production.

And redundancy costs twice the resources (or more) because it's redundant. That's the ENTIRE POINT.

VM's are the only thing I'll use now. The only blockers are those stupid things that DEMAND a certain piece of hardware (e.g. dongles, etc.). Everything else, you get a VM. I run CCTV NVRs from inside VMs and they work perfectly. And it's cheap to spin up a VM every time someone says "the guy is here to install the software for X". Don't faff - just give them an entire VM to do whatever they want in, and then put that VM on your network. They can have no argument then about "Oh, well, it's not compatible" or "it's because you have X installed", etc. Most of my vendors are offering their appliances (e.g. webfilters, firewalls, etc.) as VM images now.

VMs and VLANs are the best thing to happen to in-house IT in decades. It's literally makes your network portable, to the extent that there's one backup device in my pool which is just a cheap NAS, large enough to hold and offer every VM out over iSCSI.

I could take that box. Find ANY decent server hardware. Load those VM's. Boot them up. Have EVERYTHING running as it was in under a day. Literally my entire network in a box. And - in theory -the only thing I'd need to get running on new physical hardware is a way to load up the one VM that's the hypervisor to all the other VM's. Nested hypervisors are cool.