I’m not sure how many other small to medium sized trucking companies are making the leap into the virtual server market, but I know we are certainly pushing into this arena. 

If you have not heard of virtualization, you certainly will.  Diane Greene (the CEO of VMware) made the statement last week at their VMWorld conference “A year ago, we were talking about virtualization becoming mainstream; now we’re talking about it as industry.”

As hardware prices have come down over the years and machines become more powerful, it is possible now to get a single box with enough processing power to actually run multiple operating systems simultaneously in virtualized instances, hence virtualization.

At Tradewinds and in my home lab, I have been experimenting with this technology.  My primary business driver for this initiative is not necessarily to do more with less, but is simply for disaster recovery.  Over the July 4th Holiday in 2006 while on a family vacation in Florida, I got a call mid week from my associate that our primary server had blue screened and it wasn’t coming back. 

This meant that all of our functions for email, voice mail, SQL Server, Domain Controller, DNS, websites, etc. were all dead in the water since this was our primary server.  We had contingency plans for some of the components, but not all of them.  What transpired next was a turbulent recovery process and a ruined vacation…hence when I became serious about finding a “better” disaster recovery model.

This is where virtualization steps in.  Virtualization has been around a long time and has been predominately owned by VMware who still are the key player in this industry, however as usual Microsoft has recognized this technology is entering the mainstream.  So, true to Microsoft’s style, they publish a “free” version of their virtualization solution.  I have been experimenting with their Virtual Server 2005 product for some time now. 

We recently deployed a backup email server that runs Suse linux and we virtualized a legacy polling machine.  Now these servers don’t run on their own hardware, they run on another server in a shared space, however they logically appear no different than they did before. 

The beauty of this is that if the machine they are running on fails, no big deal, simply bring the virtual server back up on another piece of hardware.  This works because virtualization makes an abstract representation of the hardware that is not tightly coupled to the physical hardware. 

The architecture we are moving to now is implementing Microsoft Virtual Server solely because there is no cost for this technology and it is now very stable and reliable.  There aren’t nearly as many features as what exists in VMware’s product and the speed is arguably slower, but you can’t beat the price, particularly when VMware is still a very expensive alternative.

I was encouraged the other day to read a blog entry about Total Quality Logistics, LLC making the move from VMware to Microsoft Virtual Server.  I think we will see more of this in the marketplace, particularly since Microsoft is building virtualization into the core of Longhorn.

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