Virtual Desktops or VDI’s are cheaper and make your business more profitable

Vritual Desktop Infrastructure or VDI’s are desktops that are stored on servers often centralized on premise or in data centers.  This technology has a few very strategic advantages over a traditional desktop and server infrastructure. 

Problem, Desktops are not always there for my employees - Centralized VDI desktops can be highly available.  High availability means you have access to that device 99.99% of the time almost no standard desktop will meet this expectation.  They will get a bad Windows update or a virus minor or major or the user will make  a mistake or a bad uninstall or even just to upgrade and update business applications all cost your employees time.  Think of what an hour or a day of lost productivity out of your best worker costs you?    All desktop hard drives have a mean time before failure of 3-5 years.  You are buying something that will break and cost you money.

VDI is the solution because every time you log out the virtual desktop you were workign on is destroyed and when you log in you get  Windows 7 like its first day.  Any bad installs, or viruses are instantly gone.  On top of that your desktop is on redundant server grade hardware.

Problem: Upgrades cost me more time and more money.  To install that new program update on 50 machines takes our staff or consultants a whole evening or weekend.  Costing time and money

VDI Solution:  The update is applied to the template, tested live to ensure it works.  When confirmed that it works its deployed as people log out and back in their new desktop will have the updated program.  1 update regardless of the number of desktops.

VDI Fears:

1.  I like my desktop box

We will give you one of the most advanced thin clients, with dual, quad monitor support isntant access to USB devices.  Come see our demo or we will bring it to you and put it up against your desktop

2.  I don’t understand virtualization I feel more comfortable with a standard desktop. 

Virtualization just makes more resources more available and is getting easier and easier to mange

3.  This sounds complicated

This is all managed through a basic web interface or taken care of entirely by our highly skilled and trained staff.

4.  This sounds expensive

VDI’s, including 2 servers are on average half the cost of traditional desktops

5.  Im not ready to put this in the cloud

Thats OK we can intall it at your office

6.  What if my interenet goes down?

If you host it with us we will setup redundant internet links through multiple providers and technologies so you are always on 99.99% of the time

VDI’s are cheaper, better and will increase your productivity.  Call us today to see a LIVE demo!

What Value Does Virtualization Provide?

It makes no difference whatsoever how amazing a technology is if it doesn’t provide a defined value for your business.  Below are the typical values businesses can expect to receive from deploying virtualization technology:

• Agility – Virtualized environments provide an incredible platform for adapting your company’s technology quickly in support of changing business goals and direction.
• Scalability – Adding new functionality to your company’s technology almost always presents numerous, critical, and complex concerns ranging from loss of productivity to significant capital expenditure. Virtualization simplifies this issue by eliminating hardware concerns from the equation.  In fact, a properly designed virtualization infrastructure will support relatively large changes in your company’s technology with very little complexity or out-of-pocket expense in comparison to a non-virtualized environment.
• Disaster Recovery – The ability to take an “image” of your server has been around for some time.  This ability is valuable from a disaster recovery standpoint because instead of rebuilding your server from scratch, you can simply reinstall the existing image of your server on a different piece of hardware which saves incredible amounts of time.  However, taking an existing image and installing it on a different hardware platform has always been at best difficult, and at the worst, nearly impossible. With a virtualized environment, however, this concern is eliminated because virtualization breaks the one-to-one ratio between your server hardware and software.

Note:  Management – Managing your company’s technology is a significant expense regardless of the size of your company or the market you’re in.  Yet, because technology is critical to productivity for almost every business these days, it is an expense that is absolutely necessary.  Virtualization doesn’t necessarily add to the management time required, and in certain circumstances, it can help reduce management time by removing the complexity of managing different hardware platforms.  However, it can also add some processes to your existing management routine, and if you don’t have professional, in-house IT support, you may need to leverage the services of your existing IT consultant a little more.

How Does Virtualization Work?

From a very high level virtualization architecture  is pretty straight forward.  You take one very powerful server and you install virtualization software on it.  Once you have the virtualization “layer” installed, you then install any desired server systems on top of it.  This effectively creates a platform for a one-to-many hardware-to-software relationship.  Of course, all the hardware and software specifications need to be taken into account cumulatively to properly design and deploy a virtualized environment.

What is Virtualization

The simplest way to explain virtualization may be:  the ability to run multiple operating systems on a single piece of hardware.  Of course, this is my personal definition and is specific to the context of how SMB’s typically use virtualization.  For a more formal definition, Wikipedia has a pretty good one.  Anyhow, in practice, this means that if your business employs 3 physical servers running Windows Server operating systems you could purchase one server and run all three instances of your Windows Server operating systems on that single piece of hardware. 

At first glance it may not seem that revolutionary, but virtualization is changing the way technology is used across all market segments. Really.

Virtualization 101 – Is it a Good Solution for SMB’s?

Virtualization as a technology has been around for quite some time, but it has only become prevalent within the SMB community over the past few years.  There are many reasons for this including cost, market viability, network infrastructure requirements, and more, but those barriers have been mostly removed over the past few years, making virtualization one of the most interesting and potentially valuable technologies for business today.  Yet, as we enter 2011, many businesses still don’t understand the values virtualization can provide them, nor do many businesses understand how to analyze whether virtualization is a good fit for them.  Well, read on and find out the practical aspects of utilizing virtualization technology for your business.

Practical Cloud Technologies for Small Business

For many businesses the term “Cloud Computing” is this ethereal concept, pressed upon the business community as the new and greatest thing by IT powerhouses such as HP, Microsoft, Dell and others.  As is the case with almost all new technologies, however, cloud computing isn’t really the greatest thing – at least is certainly isn’t at this point, anyhow.  In my opinion, a more accurate description would be:  it’s an evolving thing that has large potential value for business.  There is no doubt that lots of small businesses have made the decision to invest in cloud technologies over the past couple years, and many of them, I’m sure, have invested quite successfully.  But if that’s the case, what technologies have they invested in and what has made that investment successful?  The answer to that question depends on the specific business of course, however, I believe there are 4 uses of cloud technology that are very likely to provide value to small businesses today.  Check out my four-part series on some of the cloud solutions that could be valuable for your business, today: 

1. Spam Defense

2. Web & Spyware Defense

3. Automated Offsite Backup

4. Email

Virtualization. Simplified.

There’s no doubt that virtualization is becoming more and more prevalent for small businesses of all sizes.  There are lots of reasons for this including:

• Reduced downtime
• Increased performance
• Strong disaster recovery
• Scalability
• Excellent business flexibility

But I find it curious that many companies I meet with are initially confused by the concept.  So…here’s my attempt to simplify virtualization.

At its most basic level, virtualization for small businesses generally involves running multiple server operating systems on one physical server.  That’s it.  Oh sure, more than one physical server can be deployed to create better redundancy, less downtime, etc.  But just knowing that simple concept – multiple server systems running on a single piece of hardware (server) – puts you way ahead of many small businesses.

Need to get 6 more months out of a server?

Need to eek out just a little more time out of an old server?  Don’t have the time or resources to reconfigure the rest of your server roles?

At ITP we use a neat trick.  Vmware Converter.  What is Vmware Converter?  (http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/)It is a free technology which captures a physical server and backs it up to a couple of files which can be moved to any server or computer and with the use of a free or inexpensive “player” you can get that old server configuration running on reliable hardware.  This is a great way to get a few more months out of hardware it is also an excellent disaster recovery option for small to large enterprises.  Even if you have never used virtualization this tool can be a great introduction to the technology and a real business saving tool in the case of hardware on the edge.

Hyper-v installation and Server 2008 or SBS 2008

Is it time for an upgrade or a new server and looking at the new small business server 2008 and getting  a little confused?  Want to give virtualization a try?

SBS 2008 Premium is a licensing steal by Microsoft.  It provides your with physical and virtual licesenses for SBS 2008 and Server Standard 2008 32/64 bit.  As well as a full SQL 2008 license.

That is 5 licenses for the price of one and a modest price at that.

Ok, so you are sold on the license but what hardware to buy?

Things to consider when buying hardware for a virtualized environment:

1. Buy Mainstream – (Dell, HP, Major Brands) Why?  No not a sales pitch per se but this is new for Microsoft so they go to Dell and HP for driver support first not the stuff you can buy from random build our own sites.  Sorry.
2. Get the right processor – make sure you are buying a virtualization ready or newer processor.  This is an Intel Processor most likely made in the last 2 years at least
3. RAM – the more the better.  If you use server core installation of windows server 2008 and hyper-v the non GUI install still has a RAM overhead so 12GB of RAM total will really probably give you about 10.5GB of RAM for your virtual machines.  I would say 12GB is a minimum for running 2 64bit servers.  That will give each about 6GB of RAM.
4. RAID – pay attention to the RAID card make sure it is from a major manufacturer and has some way of indicating failure since the virtual machines will not be able to detect it.
5. SAN – (Storage Area Network) is an array of disks in a separate box.  While the new Hyper-V beta is the only starting to support live migration.  I just want to make sure we always let clients know between v=Vmware or future Microsoft a shared storage device is required for live migration ( for this discussion lets ignore this for now)

Install Considerations Read more »

Restoring a virtual machine in real life

You may have heard or read the hype over the last 10 years about the “cloud” and “virtualization” to consolidate your network hardware.  It all sounds “neat” and a little confusing but how does it really help?  Let me share a real story of a time when virtualization has made a difference in our business.  (Note names have been changed but the facts in this case are real)

I had been working hard getting a 2 NFR licsenses from Lexis Nexis Time Matters enterprise working on 2 servers, one in our main office in Milwaukee and one in our Madison office.  The purpose was to demonstrate the use of SQL replication technology.  That is SQL’s ability to keep to SQL databases perfectly in sync.  This mixed with Time Matters 9.0 Enterprise can create 2 or more databases all over the U.S. which stay in sync in real time but individuals can still connect locally not using VPN, Terminal Server or Citirix.  Neat stuff and very useful for some of our mid to large clients.

I digress.  I was using a vmware virtual machine of Server 2003 to demonstrate mostly because I could work on it on my mac in vmware fusion when I had time and then could ultimately transfer it to a more powerful machine in the Madison office whenever I needed it.  Using a virtual machine or a “VM” allowed me to configure the server and have all those settings maintained no matter which machine I hit “play” on.  Really it can be that simple.  Vmware stores the entire OS, settings, files in a matter of a couple files which can be transfered and with vmware player (free, http://www.vmware.com/download/player/) you push a green play button and your in action.

True story, the morning of the demo for the client the hard drive on the machine I was going to demo it on failed.  I did not panic I did not even call our main office.  Instead I drove to our datacenter with the vm on a usb hard drive.  Plugged it into one of our existing servers and hit “play”.  The demo was never reschedule on our client and I think our sales team at ITP may have even been a little impressed.

Vmware, Hyper-V or Xen – virtualization is coming to the SMB market and to the home user.  I answer virtualization questions daily from friends, family and colleagues.  I called a maintence guy in Florida to ask about the internet setup for one of our traveling clients and he said “Hey, you got a minute for a question about vmware fusion…?”

I will work up a post on virtualiztion basics so that we can demystify virtualiztion.  It is not marketing this technology makes business sense.