[ale] Virtualization

[Mike Harrison]

James P. Kinney III summarized nicely:
> It always seemed to me that virtualization is a good thing for test
> environments and extremely light loads that are not mission critical.
> But the ideal use in a mission critical environment is as a backup
> environment for the real hardware.

Summarized nicely! - Locally at an AITP meeting, the Chief
InfoSec Officer from UNUM (insurance company)spoke about a lot of things,
and added some problems in that some OS 'updates' caused
problems with their virtual environments. They were in the process
of de-virtualization, largely because of her pet peave, security issues,
but also because much of the "Load up an instance for XXXX" was really
a work around of setting up a single system to do more than one thing
with one or more intelligent administrators.

My personal experience with them is, even with MS-OS's..
50 poorly configured virtual machines on 10 physical servers
does not necessarily outperform 5 properly setup systems
doing the same jobs.

And yes, I have VMWare backups of the few Server2003 boxen
I must deal with. Wonderful way to have an "Oh crap" backup
of a working system while you build a replacement.

My favorite was for a utility: For each 200 simultaneous communications 
processes (managing a "smart grid"), the meter manufacturer said they need 
a seperate 2003 Server (running the meter manufacturers data collection 
engine, mostly a modified FTP server...). The utility rolls out the data 
collectors on VMware ESX, 5 of them.. on a single machine. And complains
because they can't get over 400-500 connections running on the whole 
cluster.... cluster is a good word. ;)

And I know it works, but the idea of running firewalls
in virtual instances on the machines they are designed to
protect is just wrong in my head.. like eating spaghetti
with a spoon.

And now.. back to our virtual discussions...