Vmware for production

There’s been a lot in the press of success stories with vmware; there was the water company that found the unique benefits of a virtual infrastructure.

I thought I’d introduce a conversation that I was part of with respects to vmware for production.  Before I begin, let’s define what is meant from production.  Many of the banks operate in a development/support and production type of infrastructure.  That is, my developers write the application, request a box from infrastructure, infrastructure look after this box and assist development/support in making sure it all works.  The key being infrastructure say they support it in production, they have to meet agreed SLA’s and service requirements, (in theory anyway).

So the debate surrounded the following, one of the business teams wanted to place their virtual windows IIS server into production.

There were horrified gasps, vmware in production?

*  But how do we do the performance management?
*  What about downtime?
*  The ESX server is production, but I need to occasionally take the box down for service updates, patches etc,
*  How do we go about capacity?
*  How to deal with a mixed production/development environment

Needless to say it appears we’re not quite ready to facilitate such a request, not for technical reasons, more comfort and process based ones.

Yes you need to take the esx server down for maintenance, but you need to take the session down for patching anyway at some point, and very few applications don’t have a downtime slot.

The way handle this is to first prove the concept within IT, to the dba’s the middleware, windows/unix and networks teams, so that when it’s time for a full sales pitch, the majority are involved everyone’s ready to play ball. 

This is where vitalising the infrastructure comes into play, (coupled with getting your vmware performance right), those back office IT systems, that officially are production, but in terms of user experience, if we were without them would not be user affecting.