 ServersThis newsletter is sponsored by Emerson Network PowerNetwork World's Servers Newsletter, 07/26/07Owen Bird law firm flies from VMware, Part 2By Jennifer MearsWhat follows is the conclusion of my talk with Stephen Bakerman, IT manager at Owen Bird, a law firm in Vancouver, British Columbia. In this newsletter, Bakerman talks in more specifics about Virtual Iron and why the law firm is using Virtual Iron’s technology to reach its virtualization goals. Read Part 1 of the interview here. Jennifer Mears: You’ve had Virtual Iron now for about a month. Are you running it in production? Stephen Bakerman: Yes, we’re running in both test and production. We only have a single physical server running Virtual Iron at this point, but we’re running our BlackBerry server on there in full production. We’re going to be rebuilding our terminal server configuration and we’re going to be building that on that unit. We also keep a test environment for our accounting package running, which is a SQL server and another terminal server, which will be running on there 24/7.
Mears: Are all of these applications Windows applications? Virtual Iron’s support for Windows is relatively new, isn’t it? Bakerman: Yes, today all the applications are Windows. We haven’t had any problems. It’s rock solid. Mears: What features are the most important to you in Virtual Iron? Bakerman: Outside of their support and their cost, they have a feature set that is similar in my opinion to VMware. We’ve got their live migration, which if a server goes down it will restart automatically on the next available physical server. If a physical server becomes overloaded with CPU utilization or memory utilization, I like the fact that I can create policies to move those virtual servers across from one physical machine to another without having to shut them down, restart them or without even having to get involved to monitor them on an ongoing basis. The other thing is the virtualization manager being able to integrate into our SAN. We bought an entry level SAN, an Excel Meridian SAN. VMware wouldn’t support it at all. Excel Meridian said they would work with Virtual Iron and Virtual Iron was willing to work with them. Now we have our Excel Meridian SAN working in production with Virtual Iron. Mears: Were there any concerns from the shareholders about Virtual Iron since it was the new kid, while VMware has proven itself? Bakerman: There were. But I had the promise from Virtual Iron that it would work and I believed them. They stood behind it. Every time I had a technical question I was put in contact with an engineer. Mears: Where exactly are you running the Virtual Iron software and what are you virtualizing? Bakerman: We’re running it in the server room locally, so it’s our 18th server. We’re running our complete accounting test environment, our BlackBerry enterprise server is in production and we’re going to be building all of our test servers on Virtual Iron. Everything is going to be virtualized. Mears: How much consolidation do you think you’ll be able to do with Virtual Iron? Bakerman: We hope we can get down to six servers from 17. Without virtualization, we would need to buy five new servers in the next six months. Considering about $20,000 per server, we figure we could save about $100,000 a year. And we’ll be able to move more quickly. With virtualization, we can go and provision a server in a virtual environment and have it up and running in hours, rather than the week or so it used to take to get a physical server and software up. Mears: What advice do you have for your peers who may be unsure as to which virtualization technology is the best fit for their environments? Bakerman: It comes down to budget and technology needs. Even if we had the money to go with VMware, I would still go with Virtual Iron. Their support is phenomenal and their feature set is very competitive with VMware. And the technology capabilities are going to improve, it’s going to go back and forth as far as which vendor has better features. Virtual Iron has a tool that makes it easy for you to take Microsoft Virtual Server images and copy them over to Virtual Iron. My advice is if you’re looking for something that’s simple to use and easy to get around with, Virtual Iron is the way to go. 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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