I’m too low on the food chain to get wooed by vendors very often, so when I saw that VMWare was coming to campus and that lunch would be provided, I jumped all over that. Not only did I get lunch, but I also got breakfast, a USB mouse (with retractable cord!), and a notepad complete with biodegradable pen! Well that’s great and all, but what’s even better is the knowledge they gave me.
I’ve used VMWare’s desktopy products: Player, Workstation, and Server. Useful products, especially Server because it’s free. I only have a few servers in my department, so I don’t have need for enterprise products. A few test VMs to play with are all I really need — or so I thought. After seeing the power of ESX, I’m starting to reconsider. With VMWare ESX, I could combine pretty much everything onto two beefy servers and never have to worry about hardware problems. If I have a hardware problem, I’ll just let ESX’s High Availability services take care of it.
Of course, it would be hard to justify the hardware expenses — I can’t even convince my boss to pony up the 2k to pay for my Solaris training. If I could start from scratch, though, that would be the way to go. Also, I like getting free stuff.
That’s great! I don’t go to many things where there are vendors, either. What kind of presentation did they give?
If you decide to implement ESXi, I’d love to see an introduction to getting it up and running. I’ve thought about it too, but I don’t have the time to do the background research and get the base knowledge.
@Matt: There were a variety of presentations. A couple of them were basically “our company is awesome, and we’re better than our competitors.” EMC reps gave a spiel about some of their storage solutions. Admittedly, I didn’t pay close attention to that part, but I do recall that they’re selling their big storage racks with SSDs, if you have money that you need to get rid of in a hurry.
What really stuck out about ESX is vMotion, which allows you to dynamically move a VM from one physical machine to another in the same ESX cluster with no end-user impact. There are a few other features that keep your uptime high.
The other interesting aspect is the ability to manage desktops. In my department, we use a standard base image for Windows, and then control individual machines through a combination of AD/Group Policy and SCCM. With VDI (http://www.vmware.com/products/vdi/) you can maintain multiple versions of an app (e.g. make Office 2003 and 2007 co-exist) and let your users run off of thin clients.
Well, I hope that answers your question well enough. Without divulging too much in the way of office politics, I’ll just say that while I remain in my current department, I don’t see ESXi being implemented in an operational sense. If it does happen, though, I promise to write it up.
Sweet, thanks!
My major argument against vmotion has been economic 😉 It’s damned expensive to get a setup that will let you do it, but from everything I’ve heard, it’s great once it’s there.
You remember what Dave Barry said…
“The word ‘politics’ is derived from the word ‘poly,’ meaning ‘many,’ and the word ‘ticks,’ meaning ‘blood sucking parasites.'”