Whew, have things been busy. But how great it is to be busy doing God's work!
Well, being a non-profit, we are always looking for ways to effectively use the resources were are given. Those resources come as assets, partnerships, financial investments and personnel. Since we want to make the best use of the resources, we get the opportunity to look at things from a different persective. Now that does not always meaning finding free or "cheap", despite what anyone thinks. When it comes to technology, nothing, I repeat, nothing is free!So, one of the projects I am working on involves making a decision for the organization on a reporting and eventually, an ETL platform.(More on the details of that project in another post) As such, we really are going to need to have another server for development/testing and for production use. Interestingly, one of the existing servers, a Dell Poweredge 6600, has room for another processor and lots more memory. Hmmmm....that got us thinking. What about virtualization.
Now, I have used virtualization technology in test environments a bit over the last few years but have not kept up with developments in the marketplace. Well, I was certainly pleased with what I found.I spent the last 9 years in a Microsoft shop and that was after a VAX/VMS, HP-UX, AIX shop. So, I am not the biggest fan of the Microsoft Server platform but also not a big opponent either. I think the different O/Ses have their places. However, I can't help but go back to a Unix or Linux base as a workhorse. I was pleased as punch to learn that the VMWare Server is now offered as a free virtualization platform.
So, I'll spare you the gory details on not using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 and move on to where we are at. Being a small IT shop, we don't have a data center chock full of servers that would need to be centrally managed so the free VMWare Server product is fine. If you need this kind of data center management for virtual environments, take a look at the not-so-free Virtualization management platform from VMWare.As part of my testing, er... playing, I loaded VMware Server on my Dell D520 Laptop with 1GB RAM. My base O/S on the laptop is usually Windows XP Pro SP 2. Install was a snap of the server. I quickly created a new virtual machine for a test Windows XP Pro SP2 machine since I am constantly messing my base O/S up by loading and testing lots of software. After the first reboot of the VM, I logged into the machine and installed the VMWare Tools. This is an important steps as it significantly improves display and mouse performance as well as other under the hood improvements. (Don't forget this step.)
I typically use a bridged network setup as it allows the VM direct network access via the host's NIC. Quick, easy and maintainable. Really, everything works the same in the VM. The only quickly noticed difference is that instead of the three finger salute to login (Ctl-Alt-Del) you use Ctl-Alt-Ins. Now, I wanted to have a way to always get back to this clean install of the VM operating system for new tests. That is where the snapshot feature shines.First thing to remember is that before you take the snapshot of the guest O/S, you MUST defragment the guest O/S virtual drive. You can do this either with the defrag tools in the guest O/S or from the VMWare Server console. You do this by shutting down the guest O/S. Then edit the VM setting and choose the Defragment option under the hard disk options.
Once done with the defragmentation, take your snapshot. This snapshot can be used to move the VM back to the exact state it was in at the time of the snapshot. According to the documentation, if you take the snapshot without defragmenting the virtual disk first, you lose the ability to effectively defragment the virtual drive. Keep in mind that the virtual disk is actually just a file or files on the host operating system. Therefore, you will also want to ensure the host operating system keeps it's physical drives free from excessive fragmentation.Now, I certainly could not stop at Windows XP Pro. Hehe.... So, next on the list was a virtual Ubuntu Server 6.06 LTS and an installation of Ubuntu Ultimate. Again, no problems. Worked like a champ. By the way, I loaded the Ubuntu Ultimate by telling the virtual machine definition that the virtual CD-Rom drive should actually point to and .ISO image. Again, worked a treat.
Fair enough, but since Windows operating system can be a bit tempermental and subject to security issues, what about using a Linux operating system as the host to then run the Windows servers as virtual machines. So, that's what we tried. We loaded Ubuntu Server 6.06 LTS onto an older Dell desktop. So, we had a nice Linux server running which we quickly loaded the VMWare Server onto. I chose not to install web base MUI and instead to use the existing VMWare Server Console on my laptop to remotely connect and manage the VMWare Server on the Ubuntu server.Sure enough, I slapped a Windows 2003 Server R2 installation CD into the drive on the Ubuntu server and went back to my office. I fired up the VMWare Server console and create the VM definition. Then I booted the VM and the CD-ROM on the Ubuntu server came to life runing the Windows 2003 Server setup. Less than an hour later, I have a fully functioning Windows server running as a VM on a machine with Ubuntu server as the host operating system. Sweeeeet!
Now I am testing the Linux client for Reptrospect which is what we use for backups. I need to get comfortable with disaster recovery functionality for the host and most importantly, the VM's. One of the nice things about the VM's is that if I have all the files for each VM, I can move then to another server, even with a different host O/S and start them up. They'll keep chuggin along. Nice!