After my benchmarking coffee post, a few people sent me quizzical emails asking about the project I’m on.  So I thought I’d blog it.  The project in a nutshell is to help the team here (at a dev shop) migrate from Lotus Notes to a Sharepoint/Exchange, and collapse the domain model in the process.

My role in all of this is making sure the business requirements are met [and not overlooked] by the technical implementation.  So virtualization is [still] huge part of my work, it’s just not my work if that makes sense?  I’m finding most of my time is looking at little things like:

  • How long roles are to be virtualized - all new servers/roles are starting as Virtual Machines, each role is classified as a ‘workload type’ and projected growth.  Roles that could potentially outgrow a VM and require physical hardware (that’s either politically or technically) are flagged.   
  • Workload lifecycle - this is mostly how long do we intend to keep the role.  So far 5 to 8 years appears to be the norm.  We are preferring the “Build new and migrate data” as apposed to in place upgrade  (but this could change).   At the moment we’re just gathering support articles and doco.  We won’t have hard candidates for another 7-8 months, so we’ll revaluate these on an on-going basis.      
  • Archival and replay of legacy systems - mostly identifying systems for P2V and methods for storage.  Storage at the moment will most likely be 80Gb USB drives.  Only a couple of systems need to be kept on-line
  • Service Availability - Focusing on “service windows” rather than “raw thumping uptime”.  Most services only have key times they need to be available, and an outage of 30 minutes is mostly acceptable.  Backup and restore requirements seem to consume most of my time in this area. 
  • Assorted Application stuff - most of this is just ’sanity check’.  If we place role ‘X’ at site ‘Y’ it will impact the delivery of service ‘Z’ by ‘ABC’; So what are the different ways we can mitigate the pain of ‘ABC’.
  • …lots of other miscellaneous duties and drinking coffee every chance I get of course.

It’s a little frustrating at times, but different and interesting from what I’m used to.

So what virtualization am I using?  Well, at the moment I have 5 Virtual Machines locally that I use everyday for ‘validating’ (it’s not really testing).  I’m using Virtual PC for this because it’s sinfully easy to drag and drop files between each VMs.  Vista Readyboost and Virtual PC is certainly a winning combination, and has mode a noticeable improvement.  Overall, everything just works nicely.

The servers however are all hosted housed on a combination of 3x virtualization platforms:  VMware VI3, VMware Server and Virtual Server R2 SP1.  There are no plans to standardise on any one platform just yet — and there is a need to maintain all three, because each of the project groups and development teams have justified to keep their current investment.  Hey, that’s fine by me.  It’s better than the alternative of a hundred whiteboxes scattered around!  (hence my outburst last Thursday)

So I think that’s the all the important stuff for now?  There is heaps of other cool stuff being identified along the way, but all this will be keeping me busy for the moment :)