Virtual Servers
 

If my corporate masters switch my facility from the particular vendor's application that I support to the one that is their corporate standard, we will be running on virtual servers from a centralized data center. I need to know enough about virtual servers to carry on intelligent conversations about them at meetings, etc. ... My managers on-site know nothing about virtual servers, so anything I know about them will allow me to appear useful.

I cast myself upon the mercy of the Cellar Technology gurus... enlighten me. :::tries to snatch the pebble from your hand, but fails:::

the best thing about them is that you only have to tip them 10% cuz they don't have feelings

go to vmware.com. They have some good information under the "overview" heading.

VMware happens to be what they're using. Reading on it a bit, I can understand why. Corporate IS takes all these legacy servers from each facility and packs them into virtual servers living on their SAN as LUNs. They can be cloned, swapped, in other words no downtime for maintenance or upgrades.

The idea, I guess, is also to fully utilize the hardware, like a mainframe, and also to meter out resources where they're needed. Also, each instance of an OS (whichever one you are using, on top of the VM kernel, which is on top of Linux, which is on top of the actual hardware) doesn't have multiple services running, your virtual servers can keep tasks distinct, utilize the hardware while keeping your OS from getting mucked up, or killing multiple applications if one of them crashes.

My director had a question, "how can they build a pipe big enough to pump all our data in and out of this thing (if we have been using multiple servers with multiple big pipes)?" I guess part of that is that the communication between the virtual servers isn't actually on the network, because they aren't actually seperate pieces of hardware. Do these virtual servers have virtual IPs to talk to each other? Ultimately, I guess the question of network robustness falls on corporate's SAN architecture. I guess, maybe most of all, the idea of having our servers geographically seperated from us is a little unnerving. As in, I hope someone with a backhoe doesn't sever whatever lines are running between here and across town.

Does it sound at all as if I know anything about what I'm talking about yet?

It does sound like you know what you are talking about. They do have virtual IPs to talk. There are some limitations in data flow. It is important to know the limitations of the hardware itself. A maxed out pipe is a maxed out pipe. I am not a guru on them by any stretch of the imagination. I am sure you can find a true virtual server BB somewhere to get some more in-depth answers.

Oh, and the backhoe issue is real. We have multiple locations, connected via a point to point T1, and a backhoe has taken us out more than once. That is where our DR plan #2 comes into play.

Makes me wonder what level of ownership corporate claims over the DR/BC plan in facilities they've virtualized...