Virtualization and crack

I led a virtualization strategy project at a large hedge fund. This involced collecting application requirements including mainly performance requirements, whether or not the applications could be virtualized according to the application vendor (pretty much everything can technically), downtime, RTO, RPO, backup requirements, etc.

Once I had these requirments I used the VMware tool Capacity Planner to assist me in collecting performance data. It also makes recommendations on whether or not a server can be virtualized based on parameters put into the system.

A list was created, I spoke with the business and developed a migration plan. Luckily at the time the P2V built into VMware was good enough. I have used Platespin in the past, but the latest version with ESX works well.

After executing the migration plan, using online migration methods for increased uptime (which is also built into the P2V tool) I sometimes had it in the plan to migrate the server to a different data center as I was also leading a data center migration project at the time.

This allowed for the ability to migrate a VM while it was being virtualized as I was also leading a data center migration project at the same time. I would import the VM into the target environment on target storage. We had the two data centers connected from a network perspective. I have had it where this wasnt possible for another client and used SRDF to migrate the VMs, which worked great and allowed for instant migrations.

My whole point of this was to tell you that the worst part of all this was that everyone liked it. Too much. We went from shoving it down peoples throats that VMs were the best and people eventually liked it so much that they became addicted. We eventually had to pull back. I set it up to be able to build a fully functional VM in 10 minutes. This made people sick to their stomachs and they wanted more.

I then built a cost model, which I will talk about later, to charge people for VMs because demand was too high. So what is the difference between a VM and a crack dealer? I guess the come down is more planned in one instance.