Virtualization is for Small Businesses

With all the hype and hoopla about the cloud, we sometimes forget that small businesses need the same type of tools needed by the large enterprises. We need it on a much smaller scale, but we still need it. After many years in the mines of the large companies I came to realize that they are in fact a conglomeration of small companies who in fact sometimes compete inadvertently with each other - But that's a subject for another blog.


Many small companies have no IT department and they may or may not be tech savvy...Much of the technology is intimidating. My next series of blogs is focused on lighting the dark art of the Cloud. Please check out the lessons I embed in this and upcoming blogs. This is part one.

<

The Journey begins with the First Step

The journey to cloud computing begins with our existing infrastructure and applications. Good Grief Charlie Brown, we can't just throw everything out and start over "in the cloud". We need to leverage exisiting investments, skills, and to the extent possible, processes. Mostly, when you bring up uhet subject "cloud", people immediately think of public cloud offerings. There is a reason for that . First is "Pooling". Pooling is the activity that enables us to break down the traditional physical silos of infrastructure and create capacity pools of CBU, memory, storage, and networking - all aspects of the Data-center - to maximize our use of resources. Secondly, we want the cloud to be able to enable automated scaling up and scaling down of resource capacity to workloads efficiently - VMware referes to this as "Elasticity". Third is "Automation". To be a truly dynamic, on-demand environment, then it has to be fully automated. All of theses characteristics have a significant impact on lowering costs. They also provide the foundation for an infrastructure that will support the agility that a business stakeholder wants. In fact, some Agencies are factoring the process of "agility" into their Enterprise Architecture policies. Cloud Computing provides the right architecture to enable infrastructure on-demand.

However, I must admit that I am not a big fan of the public cloud as it currently stands in its maturity. Many of these clouds do not have an "exit" strategy and once you are in, you are not able to back out. Additionally, being a risk averse individual, I am not yet willing to relinquish my authority and responsibility for the security and privacy of my company's resources and employees to a third pary where I have no visibility as to how they maintain security. That being said, does not negate our goal of leveraging exisiting investments currently in place in the datacenter. The concept of the cloud architecture can be applied to our existing datacenter and the creation of a Private Cloud

But, infrastructure is only the begining of the journey and it is not prudent to think that consolidation of the servers in the data center amounts to cloud computing... The clip below gives you and idea of what VMware's vision is as to get to the cloud...

Creating A Virtual Machine

Creating a virtual machine from scratch is a three step process.

First I ran the New Virtual Machine wizard to create a virtual machine. The NewVirtual Machine wizard guided me through the key steps for setting up a new virtual machine, helping me set the virtual hardware specifications and other parameters. A virtual machine provides a base x86 platform and you use the wizard to choose devices to install on that platform. For example, you select the number of virtual processors, the amount of memory, the virtual disk capacity, and so forth. Next I set the virtual machine to connect to a physical CD-ROM device or an ISO file, power on the virtual machine, and install the operating system just like you would for any new physical machine. Finally, I installed VMware Tools to enhance the performance and manageability of the virtual machine. The VMware Tools installation wizard automatically selects the VMware Tools version appropriate for the operating system running in the virtual machine.

After creating a new virtual machine, like a physical computer, it has a blank hard disk. Before you can use it, you need to

partition and format the virtual disk and install an operating system. You can install the operating system from an installation CD-ROM or create an ISO image file and install from that file.The basic procedure to install the guest operating system from CD-ROMs is to first insert the installation CD or floppy into the physical device. Then on the VM menu on workstation menu bar for the virtual machine, click the Settings option to open the Virtual machine Settings editor. On the Hardware tab, for CD/DVD Drive, be sure to enable Connect at power on option under the Device Status. Then when you power on the virtual machine, it will boot from the installation CD. From there you can follow the instructions provided by the operating system vendor to partition the disk and install the operating system. A faster and often more convenient method is to install from an ISO image file. To do so, you must change the virtual machine settings to connect to the ISO image instead of the physical device. Virtual machines support both attended and unattended installations. You can install VMware Tools after installing the guest operating system VMware Tools is a suite of utilities that enhances the performance and manageability of a virtual machine. The installers for VMware Tools for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and NetWare guest operating systems are bundled into Workstation as ISO image files.

Viola, we have a virtual machine on our host…. Next week we will look at “configuring virtual networks”… Hopefully, this will keep you from making the same mistakes I and my two colleagues made.