The Frog Blog

Productivity : Virtualization

11 30th, 2007

Today’s work force is more taxed than ever to get things done. It seems like more is expected of us and in less time. In response to this expectation workers should be vigilant in seeking out new ways to do their job more effectively. As a work force we are constantly harassed to have it done “yesterday” this makes us ragged, tired and eagerly looking forward to 5:00 PM, the weekend or our next vacation. I believe that over-taxing your employees and expecting too much from them is going to hurt your business in the long and the short-term. Companies trying to milk every hour while pinching every penny are going to be constantly frustrated by mediocre production, high turnover and low morale. If this describes your company or your peers then pay attention. Through this series I’m not only going to show you how to make your employees more productive by employing low stress methods and technology but I’m also going to show you how to give them what they need to do their jobs without breaking your bank and increasing their morale and quality of work. Today’s employers have been consumed by greed and are ruled by a board of directors and investors who want money, money, money at the expense of the company’s most valuable asset the employee.

So let’s talk about some common expectations employers have for todays laborer. As our business becomes more global more employees are expected to be more available. This might mean carrying a cell phone, pager and possibly even a laptop. Off hours request may involve providing technology based support to scheduling emergency visits with a physician. Further you may need to be able to access your desktop no matter where you are at and regardless of an internet connection. Maybe you are a small company and the burden of issuing, maintaining and insuring laptops is not within your budget. What if 2 people need the laptop at the same time? Despite the need you may need a more cost affective way of providing cost-effective off-hours access to systems regardless of internet connection availability and speed.

Now perhaps you are a technology worker and the above paragraph describes your need to be available but let’s take it to the next step. Perhaps you are a software develop or a system engineer. Not only do you need the access I describe above but you also need test systems so you can work out product or system kinks before a production roll-out. In the not too distant past we needed hardware, lots of hardware in order to insure this type of abstraction between development/test and production. The financial investment required made this a cost prohibitive situation and unfairly made IT departments and laborers a cost center instead of a revenue center which they really should be. After-all you are not going to be making any money if you don’t have a functioning network, servers and systems but that’s another discussion.

So to this point we have addressed system portability, availability and scalability. What’s nice is that there is one solution that can reasonably be applied to solve all these problems at once or on a case by case basis. Enter the idea of Virtualization. If you read my opening article where I promised a blog on virtualization and included a link to Wikipedia then you are a step ahead as you have a basic understanding of what virtualization does and some of the problems it solves. If not I’ll provide a brief overview now to provide enough information to keep you aware as the conversation progresses.

Virtualization is the ability for one piece of hardware (desktop or server) running one locally installed operating system to host other fully functioning operating systems as free-standing applications running within the host (or local desktop/server) machine. As I type this I’m working on a machine that has a native installation of Windows 2003 Enterprise Server and is hosting and concurrently (at the same time) running another instance of Windows 2003 Enterprise Server, Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista Ultimate and SuSE Linux Community Edition. I can easily jump between running instances of all 4 operating systems or I can minimize them and work natively in my local operating system. For an idea please see the linked screen shot of the 4 virtual machines running inside the VMWare Window Manager. You’ll see tabs across the top that let me jump into each running operating system just as easily as I would jump to Microsoft Word or Outlook. It’s nice simple interface that adds a lot of value to what I do every day.

Now that we understand what virtualization is, “Installed operating systems (guests) running virtually inside of a local (host) operating system in the same way an ordinary application would run.” let’s talk about how we can use virtualization to simplify tasks, reduce costs and make us more productive. Let’s assume for this part of the discussion you are a non-technical laborer that has a few basic requirements to increase productivity and minimize cost in your daily work-habit. Your requirements at their simplest are portability (I want to access my applications and data at work or home and regardless of my internet connection), fault tolerance (I want to be able to easily backup/restore my working environment in the case of data-loss or corruption.) and multiplicity (I need to clone a workspace so that all my employees are using the exact same tools and technologies and I only have to manage one instance for as many employees as I want to license.). An example of this would be that you are a doctor. You want to be able to take clinical notes and data with you so that you can interact with them at home or work and you want the luxury of not having to tote a laptop wherever you go. You also want to be able to easily make backups of your environment just in case something bad happens but you’d also like the option to easily roll back to an earlier “snap-shot” in the instance where maybe you’ve done something you regret in your current environment. Lastly, you share your practice with 3 other doctors and you want a system set up where all of you are using the exact same tools, technology and systems and you want minimal fuss in maintaining that system.

Let’s talk about how VMWare Workstation easily solves all of these problems and does so for the very fair price of $199.00. Please note the solution I’m about to describe leaves the onus on you for making sure that you have right licenses for all of your products so that in cloning a workstation you are not violating an End User License Agreement (EULA) with any product or vendor. If you are unsure about any of this please contact the company that you have purchased all operating systems and software from. Using VMWare it’s possible to install on one machine the operating system and all the required software your laborers will need to perform their work. For example you will install Windows XP Professional as the operating system and then you will install Microsoft Office, Medical Practice Management Software, Video and Audio Capture devices and software. You then install VMWare Workstation and using the built in wizard you clone the freshly installed system into a virtual machine that you can now copy to any computing platform running VMWare Workstation. So perhaps you built your environment on a Dell Notebook, using VMWare Workstation you can clone the entire Dell Notebook to a new virtual machine, store that machine on 4 USB drives and distribute those USB drives to each of your medical staff and VOILA you all have identical operating environments to work from. The only requirement is that each of your partners needs a license to VMWare Workstation and they are off and running. You have one master VMWare image that you can update and redeploy as needed. Further, there may be a special case where you want to install a local database system into your cloned virtual machine. To do this use VMWare to take a “Snapshot” prior to installing. Perform your install and carry out your work. When you are done you may no longer have need of a local database system. Instead of going through the complex and error-prone uninstall simply roll-back to your snapshot you took prior to installing the database. You begin to see how powerful this tool is and what it can for you.

So let’s take the approach now that you are a one man consultant making a meager living roaming from job to job as you collect work over the internet. It seems like every client you take has a different environment and keeping up with them all is just mind-boggling. How on earth are you going to keep up with all this and still have time to actually work? VMWare workstation again solves this problem very well. I’ll use myself as an example in this case. I have many clients scattered far and wide that I do work for. Some of them run their systems on hosted shared server environments running on PLESK, some of them host their own sites using Small Business Server 2000/2003. Yet others run a kluge of options and have a very customized environment on Windows 2003 Web, Standard or Enterprise. VMWare Workstation allows me to install virtual servers matching all of these unique configurations and run all of them at once or one at a time from my host operating system running on my desktop or my laptop. I am able to carry out all my work simply by toting around my Western Digital 500 GB MyBook and I work happily away. The beautiful thing is that I can use a variety of snapshots taken at various times within the development process and quickly jump around to test/deploy unique solutions in unique environments.

Virtualization is not some trend. It’s the real deal. It’s been here for 10+ years and VMWare is one of the flagship companies that have pioneered the technology to where it is right now. For $199 there is no reason for you not to make heavy use of this tool within your environments but just in case you are still not sold let’s talk about the tool that makes it to hard to resist. VMWare Player, a free product provided by VMWare that will let you spin up and run any Virtual Machine created by VMWare and run it. It doesn’t take long to multiply out the costs of each seat in your enterprise by each license of the free player to see that you can easily afford this no matter how large a business you are. I hate to be cliche’ but all I can say is “do the math”.

Virtualization is ready, it’s bonafide and it’s ready to make your business and your employees more productive. I’ve barely even scratched the surface in this article for the ways VMWare can help you. If you haven’t done so yet I strongly recommend that you download a VMWare Trial today and get started building and deploying virtual machines within your place of business. The free player will add value and time to your bottom line and at the end of the day who doesn’t want more value and who couldn’t use more time. If you’ve enjoyed this time saving commentary then stick around. It’s the first in many I have planned and when I’m done you and your business should be seeing more measurable productivity than you had ever thought possible.

See You Soon!

Rex