Technology Consulting Services

I've been in information-technology consulting, long enough that nothing really wows me any more.  However, there is one technology that is just amazing, and that is virtualization.  Last October, we virtualized all but two of our servers, and we have been running virtually ever since. 

Being an application development company, we typically need application servers when developing business applications for customers.  Our server room was getting close to being physically filled and we probably exceeded our cooling capability.   Some of our servers were also getting old and we were running out on system drive space and space on our data drive.  It's not much fun provisioning and loading a new server with all the applications, so I decided it was time to try virtualization.

We bought two rack mounted servers with plenty has processing power and memory and loaded VMware’s ESX server.  We then used VMware’s converter to convert our physical windows server into a virtual server.  One of the options during the conversion process was to increase the memory during the conversion, so we elected to do this.  Another option is to the change the size of the disk drives, so we increased the size of the system drive and the data drive.   The converter ran in a couple of hours and since we had exclusive access on the physical server, we decided to power that one down and power on the virtual server.

This was the amazing part, all the applications fired up; all of the data and files were there. The only thing we had to do was configure the IP address.  Everything appeared to be functioning normally, so we just left that server on to see if anyone would notice any difference.  I've forgotten that I had a drive letter mapped back to that physical server.  When I got back to my desk, I tried clicking on the drive letter.  I was amazed when the directories and files appeared in Windows Explorer.

No one noticed any differences, other than things ran faster.  So for the course of the next week, we converted the rest of our physical servers to virtual servers.  Once everything was installed in the server room, we noticed a tremendous drop in temperature.  We were also able to extend the life of some of our application servers, since they now ran with more drive space.  We also have an easier time with disaster recovery and business continuity.

I have been so impressed with VMware; I'm considering adding VMware as another one of our technology consulting services.