For the past ~6 weeks, I’ve been talking to people, getting buy-in, educating users and administrators, and generating copious amounts of project proposal and six sigma documentation presentig VMware Infrastructure as an infrastructure building and management tool.
There’s a whole manifesto behind this, but I’ll try to boil it down. Basically, this client has three sites, and the infrastructure needs to be consistent at all three sites. Also, ideally it would be overseen and generally managed from one site (there are obvious limits to this, but you get the idea). My thinking is that I have three choices:
- Order/rack/setup/test hardware and software, stage system, install stuff, ship to site, where someone else racks machine and turns it on.
- Assume and require that there is a senior enough admin at each site already to take care of all of that.
- Decouple the OS image from the hardware altogether and just build an infrastructure server “factory” at the main site, and ship (read, scp or similar) to the VMware servers at the other sites.
I chose option three – but this is oversimplification and doesn’t go into all of the benefits.
So, I just found out today that my bill has made it through Congress, and my project now has legs (read: funding)!! When the project is complete (the first phase is to migrate the main site using this methodology, and replication to other sites is a later phase of the project), I’ll try to give a talk on it or something.
In the meantime, if anyone has thoughts on virtualized infrastructure, or if you’re doing something cool with this technology, please post your comments. I value your insight!