It's been a long time coming, but Virtualisation is in full swing in South Africa now.
It's about time server, and desktop virtualisation kicked off!
The networking guys have been boasting virtualisation for years now in terms of VPN (Virtual Private Network), VLANs (Virtual Local Area Networks), and switch contexts. Now finally server and desktop virtualisation is getting into maturity in South Africa.
With server virtualisation flavours like VirtualBox (free), Zen, MS HyperV, and the market leaders VMware we are sure to see lots of interesting new ventures.
I recently had the fortune of creating a VDi solution for Vodacom Business using VMware View, on Cisco UCS blades connected to a Cisco Nexus 5k ethernet switch, and an MDS9513 Firbre switch, and must admit, it's the most fun I had in ages, having to configure Fibre Channel over Ethernet, dynamic WWNs and MACs.
Cisco is definitely way ahead of the competitors with regards to solutions around Virtualisation technology. All their products fit together seamlessly, and the only downside one might argue is the pricetag. With Cisco's Unified Computing Solutions server redundancy is the norm where everything is dynamically configurable, including SID, MAC, and WWN, this together with boot from SAN the hardware almost becomes irrelevant. If you find a server blade has failed, all you need to do is swap it with a new one, assign the service profile, and you're up and running again... A matter of minutes! Even better than that though... Using a VMware HA cluster means that your server (virtual... of course) flips over to the other server blades while maintenance happens, meaning ZERO... That's right... NO DOWNTIME WHATSOEVER!!! Now in my mind that's a world class solution!
Like I said... If you're in IT, you might as well start skilling up on this, as it's coming to take over the world!
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