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Benefits Of Production Virtualization
Rod Paddock is talking about virtualization for production, and calls it snake oil. Now, my company has done a lot of projects to consolidate and virtualizes servers, (largest in Israel in this market) although that is not the part that I am dealing with.
Server virtualization helps when you:
- Want to conserve space / power
- Have a lot of applications that are running on obsolete systems (be that NT 4.0 systems to Mystery Reports 1.2.3-rc2.1) and cannot be readily moved.
- Want to reduce manageability costs by reduce the amount of work needed
- Have low utilization (at least in today standards) for the servers, so you get more bang for the buck by overloading a single physical server with multiply VMs.
- Ability to build up and tear down environments in a snap
Rod mentions the reliability concerns of moving all servers to a few machines, but those are mitigated by clustering the virtual machines themselves (VMotion) and not from distributing over more machines.
One thing that I would warn against is putting high performance / high throughput applications / services on a VM, the performance of a VM is always going to be slower, but the question is whatever this is a true constraint for the application, in many cases, I would assume that it isn't. I have multiply projects in production now, working off VMs, and my company had several projects where the "deployment" consisted of copying the VM file to the ESX, booting, reconfiguring some URLs and going home.
So yes, I certainly think that Virtualization is a valuable tool for production.
Comments
Running a production environment in VMs is completely possible and has the advantages that you mention, plus at least one more. I have a client that runs most of their production infrastructure (IIS, SQL, BizTalk, MOSS, etc.) on VMWare ESX. Before every app deployment, patch, or other work, they snapshot the system. If there is a problem, they roll back to the snapshot. Now there's something you can't do with a physical box. (At least not easily with minimal downtime.)
After using VMware ESX for production guest for the last 20 months, I can attest to all of the advantages you mention. Another VMware feature that reduces the concern of having all of your servers on a few hosts it the HA (High Availability) feature included in VI3 Enterprise. Even if I have a host crash, all of my guest are up and running on other hosts in a matter of minutes. This is much faster than the time it would take me to get a single physical server recovered after a hardware crash.
After 20 years in the IT field, I can say that going with VMware ESX has been the best technology decision I have ever made.
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