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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?
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There's a level of facility that everyone needs to accomplish, and from there
it's a matter of deciding for yourself how important ultra-facility is to your
expression. ... I found, like Joseph Campbell said, if you just follow whatever
gives you a little joy or excitement or awe, then you're on the right track.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Terry Bozzio
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