VDI progress

In my last post in January I wrote about the VMWare VDI project that got an OK to go ahead as planned. The progress has been slow mostly because of the leadtime that the long distance broadband connection to our development center in India has.

The two servers that we will begin with (more of the same HP DL585’s) will arrive next week and will take the place of the G1 585’s that we started our virtualization project with. The G1 machines are the ones where we will begin our VDI implementation with.

We are currently in a trial with the Leostream Connection Broker and I hope I can write more about the results of that trial next week. The project currently has one engineer full time working on the Leostream trial and making preparations for the production of the VDI templates. Ideally we want to use Microsoft Active Directory groups to distinguish between the different VDI users so assigning a VDI to a user will be automatic and the number of templates can be limited. At the moment it’s looking like we will end up with about 5 different templates for the different employee types (Java developer, Java architect, Microsoft .Net developer, Microsoft .Net architect and general Project Lead).

Through the Virtual Desktops these developers will get access to our internal development environments. The advantage of which will be that we only have one development environment to manage (thus avoiding potentially costly errors because of version differences  in development and testing systems) and we can centrally manage the access from the third party into our network infrastructure.

The disadvantage is mostly cost related as the necessary bandwith is not cheap, especially on the India side. Another disadvantage is the lack of all-around (publicised) knowledge about these types of implementations.

Migration weekend coming up

Because of the fact that we are now virtualizing servers that run our most critical production systems we aren’t moving as fast as we were in the beginning of our project. We have to plan most of the work either very early in the morning or in weekends like the one coming up.

This weekend we will be virtualizing nice Oracle servers of different flavours (8i, 9i, 10g, 9iAS and 10gAS). Because some machine were still using Suse Linux 8 (SLES we can’t PowerConvert them but in stead we have prepared Oracle 8i and 9i on SLES9 templates which will be used to generate the VM’s. After that it’s just a question of either mounting the database data already on the SAN or copying it over and mounting it. Following the recommendation from EMC we use RDM’s for all our Oracle databases so that’s exactly what we’ll do here.

After this migration weekend we’ll start at putting DMZ network into the VM hosts and configuring our virtual DMZ so we can start virtualizing our webservers.