 ServersThis newsletter is sponsored by Emerson Network PowerNetwork World's Servers Newsletter, 07/24/07Owen Bird law firm flies from VMware, Part 1By Jennifer MearsThis summer, I’ve been talking with some organizations that have decided to reach out beyond VMware as they deploy virtualization in their data centers. Probably not surprisingly, the journey into x86 server virtualization typically starts with VMware. But with competitors such as Microsoft, SWsoft, Virtual Iron and XenSource revving things up with their offerings, it’s no wonder that non-VMware approaches are getting a closer look. You can read my previous interviews with the the National Association of Home Builders here, and with the Saugus Union School District in California here. Last week, I spoke with a corporation that has decided that Virtual Iron has the virtualization software that fits its needs best. Stephen Bakerman, IT manager at Owen Bird, a law firm in Vancouver, British Columbia, told me that while the firm is small – Bakerman supports about 90 users – its plans for virtualization are big. The firm tested out pretty much all the virtualization offerings before settling on Virtual Iron. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation. Our conversation continues in the second newsletter this week, which will include more detail about Virtual Iron. Jennifer Mears: How did you start looking at virtualizing x86 systems?
Stephen Bakerman: I had sold the firm on the idea of thin client computing, which centralized things on four servers and reduced management demands. But when people wanted updates or new programs, we had to move 25 people off of one server and across the other three, thereby increasing the load on the servers while we took down a server for testing purposes. It was very time consuming, very costly, people were complaining about the impact on performance, overloading the servers. We started to look into a solution and we saw [Microsoft] Virtual PC. At the time it looked like it would work, but when we started using the server class operating systems we ran into some performance issues, as well as compatibility issues. That was in the middle of 2005. We decided to hold off on broader virtualization plans. Mears: When did you look at virtualization again? Bakerman: In January of 2006, we started looking into virtualization again because things were starting to pick up in the technology race. We started playing with Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. We immediately fell in love with it. But the downside was it didn’t do virtual SMP. We had a SQL server that required that. So when Microsoft announced that Virtual Server was going to be free, and VMware came out with their free alternative, we picked up VMware and started playing with it. VMware Server gave us the USB support and the virtual SMP that we didn’t have with Microsoft Virtual Server. We realized that now we had something we could use in a production environment for a medium- to low-availability server or for full-on testing. Mears: What were some of the benefits you were seeing in using virtualization? Bakerman: We saw so much potential. We could do our development in a virtual environment. We could snapshot a virtual machine, make a change to it and if it broke, roll back without having to spend hours reconfiguring from the beginning. We also saw the potential for decreased costs in electricity, decreased cooling requirements, higher availability of equipment through virtualization. We started seeing a lot of the features that we were hoping for in VMware and immediately went out and bought a server to run it on in our test environment. Mears: So at this point, you were pretty well focused on VMware? Bakerman: In the summer of 2006, we had scheduled a significant upgrade to our accounting package and as an alternative to going out and spending $45,000 on hardware, we virtualized the entire test environment with VMware Server. We had a SQL server and a full-blown terminal server running with 20 people for training and testing in a virtual environment. When the lawyers saw this and saw the potential of virtualization, they gave us the go-ahead to do a little more as we saw fit and as it fit into the budget. Mears: So why did you then move away from VMware? Bakerman: I knew that where I wanted to be was full server virtualization: No more deploying physical servers every time we had to add a new application or a new server OS, but to use virtualization within the entire server room. It was just by fluke that we were looking at a magazine that had an article about virtualization. The article was talking about Xen and Virtual Iron and VMware. When we fell in love with VMware, I choked on the cost. But in March of this year, we started looking at Virtual Iron. And when I started looking at the feature set, a lot of what it does, we need. And looking at the pricing, I knew I had to look at the product and see what it’s like, what the company’s like, what the people working there are like. Mears: You were running VMware’s free product, VMware Server. Did you consider moving up to the enterprise version of VMware? Bakerman: Yes. The single server product was great for a test environment, but I saw the big picture being we needed more than that. There was a significant overhead performance hit because of the host OS that ran underneath the virtualization and we needed to look at a bare metal solution. But when we started looking into that [with VMware], it wasn’t cost effective at all. There was no way I could sell it to my executive committee. Mears: Virtual Iron had what you needed? Bakerman: Yes, Virtual Iron, on paper, looked like it was going to do everything that I needed. One of the big features that Virtual Iron and VMware offer is, Virtual Iron calls it Live Capacity, and what it will do is if a server goes down, it will automatically restart those virtual servers on another server that’s available. You don’t have that capability on Virtual Server 2005 or VMware Server. Editor's Note: We regret to let you know that we will no longer be publishing the Servers newsletter. The last newsletter will be mailed on Aug. 9. To keep you abreast of servers news, starting the week of Aug. 13, you will begin receiving the Data Center Alert newsletter, which mails every Tuesday. We thank you for supporting Network World newsletters.
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| Contact the author: Jennifer Mears is a freelance journalist based in Arizona. She was previously senior editor at Network World focusing on server issues. E-mail her at jlmears@gmail.com.
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