I have a belief that, one day, I will be able to go home at a reasonable time nearly every day. The process of working late into the night performing upgrades or migrations makes my family life difficult and a personal life almost impossible. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind working hard and putting in the hours when needed, but when an upgrade goes wrong and you work all night, missing a personal or family event, well, that is hard.

Virtualisation is a solution to that problem. I can take a “snapshot” of my server before the upgrade, make a copy of it, then start work. Then at 10PM when the team is tired, we can make a decision to “roll back”. Then migrate back to the copy of the server disk image or snapshot and….. go home.

More recently, for certain types of server software, we have been performing the upgrades on a copy of the virtual server in lab environments. We take a snapshot of the Virtual Hard Disk, move it into a lab virtual server, and then run the upgrade procedure. As we find problems (there is always a problem isn’t there?) we read the manuals, contact tech support, communicate with the developers, get external resources or any of other myriad things that can fix the problems. 

Previously, we were restoring from tape, or a backup on a SAN. And this could take hours to do the rollback. The temptation to keep pushing through the problem.

But now, we have often performed the upgrade a number of times and know exactly what is going to happen. Importantly, becuase we never need to load a tape or backup media, or put the Boot CD into the drive, or press F12 at boot time, we are able to do all this work from home. The hypervisor console means that we have total control over the machine environment from a remote console. 

Ah, home. Now that is where work should be done from. 

We are also saving money. It’s surprising and it’s not obvious, but we save money by:

- no longer needing to have external consultants on standby or on site for the upgrade “just in case” (and having to pay penalty rates for night work)
- travel and accomodation at the data centre
- reduction in time used for low risk projects because we can prove the upgrade in the lab
- Less overall resources. Many operational projects use less resources to achieve an outcome. 
- reduced training budget because people can learn on test systems and copies of the live systems. 
- not purchasing expensive KVM systems to have remote control of servers

You might also guess that there is a lot less stress going on. While it is true that designing and creating the virtual servers then learning the tools that manage and control those systems took some time and some money, it is not as bad as you might think. Why ? Because it is the same as what we already do ! You see, a virtual server still just a CPU, Memory and Hard Disk Drives. 

Virtualisation means that I can usually go home at a good time, be less stressed and spend more time at home since I can do server work remotely. Thats good enough for me.

 

Greg Ferro is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight from Greg Ferro and other experts, please visit www.insightcommunity.com.