VMware Workstation 8 Tutorials
Introduction / Pros and Cons
Subtitles of the Movie (VMware Workstation 8 / Introduction / Pros and Cons)
Let's talk about some Virtualization Pros and Cons in this video because it's very easy when you read all the marketing hype out there to kind of fall into the trap of thinking Virtualization solves every problem we've ever experienced in information technology. And it's the answer to pretty much any ill that we have and that is not exactly true, as a matter of fact, it's not true by long shot. So in this video let's start off just by talking about what are the pros and then some of the real world cons or some disadvantages of working in a virtualized environment. First of all, let's talk about what's good about it. Well all the under utilized resources are used more efficiently. Now historically we only had one server running one application, depending on how the application was set up, depending on what it was for example. All the network services like DNS, DHCP all those kinds of things, just simply didn't use a whole lot of resources most of the time. They would have their little spikes and so for the rest of the time that machine sat there, CPU's running along at less than ten percent utilization, you never using anywhere near the memory that's on the machine. And so that's an under utilized expensive resource and so by stacking a bunch of these things in a virtual environment on one machine, we're getting our money's worth to speak out of the memory, out of that CPU and all that stuff. Now we're obviously going to be using less hardware if we put multiple computers onto one machine. So think about it, instead of having to own an Apple Mac Book Pro and say an HP laptop so that you can run Windows, you can now get one Notebook and so you could get the Mac Book Pro, then you could use virtualization software to virtualize the Windows machine on there. So you got less hardware, now what does that mean? Well it means obviously less expense, I didn't have to buy two laptops, I don't have to buy two servers, all that sort of thing. There's less maintenance, I only have to maintain one machine now. There's fewer hardware related issues, I have fewer hard drives to go out, I have fewer CPUs to have a problem with, fewer motherboards. You get where I'm going here, fewer keyboards, all that stuff. Lower server to administrator ratio in corporate environments on the servers because we have fewer physical machines for administrators to keep up, repair, replace parts, troubleshoot and so forth. Also in the corporate environment especially, less space and less heat and I've been in situations in the corporate world where they spent quite a bit of money just on the air conditioning systems and the backup systems to make sure that the server room stayed cool enough to keep the servers from overheating. And so that's always been a challenge and then probably the biggest pro, the biggest advantage for virtualization is, you have strongly isolated environments. So when one gets in trouble, it's not necessarily going to create problems for the others, while at the same time, we're getting all the advantages, we've already talked about here about less hardware. We're going to use our resources more efficiently and so forth. So what could possibly be wrong with this scenario? What are the disadvantages of virtualization? Well here's the biggest one, it's the all your eggs in one basket aspect. A physical failure now will possibly have a much larger impact. If you have a motherboard problem on a single server that's running say eight other machines, guess what? You just lost all eight machines. If you have a network issue on that machine, you just lost some machines. So what we're going to have to do here is figure high availability fell over, that sort of thing into a design on virtualization. We won't get into that a whole lot but it's just going to be part of it. Degraded performance is simply the reality of virtualization, we're going to talk a little bit later about some of the magic that's going on that VMware actually did when they actually invented the, the I86 or the X86 Virtualization World for us. But anything running in a virtual machine is going to be somewhat degraded in performance. Now sometimes it's not as noticeable, the virtualization's getting much, much better, especially CPU manufacturers get into the game here and start to add their own two cents in. But still, you're always going to have a little bit of degraded performance. Then there's new administrative skills required to work with virtual machines, especially in a corporate environment where you have many, many different servers, some administrative skills get tested and there's some new things you have to do. More complex troubleshooting, when I'm trying to troubleshoot issues on a virtual environment, I have to determine is it the host system that's having the problem? Is it one of the guest systems? Is it more than one of the guest systems? What exactly is going on? And it can lead to some interesting troubleshooting deals. Now new Management Tools, this goes right along with new administrative skills being required. One thing that's happening in the virtualization market, there is no standardization at all on Management Tools and so each different product is done a little bit differently. But you are going to have just some New Management Tools, you're going to learn the Management Tools in VMware Workstation in this course. And they're always going to be just a little bit different, a lot of the same terms and functionalities but a little bit different way of getting there. And then here's another big one, virtual machines sprawl. It's so easy just to throw up a virtual machine, to download an appliance, to get a copy of a virtual machine from somebody else, to build one at home, bring it in and load it. So before you know it, you could have, say 300 virtual machines out there and it can get real interesting, now you're starting to shoot yourself in the foot with disk space and, and performance and all sorts of things. So just a little brief overview of the fact that virtualization brings us some really great things to information technology but it can also introduce some challenges for us. So don't treat it as the end all correction for anything that's going wrong in your IT world.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | VMware Workstation 8 |
| Author: | Mark Long |
| SKU: | 34309 |
| ISBN: | 978-1-61866-043-5 |
| Release Date: | 2012-05-04 |
| Duration: | 8 hrs / 99 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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