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Offering a virtual hosting solution makes a lot of sense on the surface since virtualization seems to be one of the hottest topics these days. There are attractive cost savings through efficiencies and economies of scale. Although our department has already committed to using VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3, I would be curious to find out how such an offering from ACNS and AIS would be structured. Will ACNS and AIS be looking at a similar offering for Active Directory and associated services such as calendaring for staff and possibly faculty? There are attractive cost savings there too both in terms of resources spent on scheduling meetings across departments with various calendaring systems and underutilized physical servers. Firmin Charlot, MCSE, A+, Information Systems Manager Educational and Support Services 162 Student Services Building East Lansing, MI 48824 [log in to unmask] <blocked::mailto:[log in to unmask]> (517) 432-7541 Submit technical requests at http://help.ess.msu.edu/ <blocked::http://help.ess.msu.edu/> ________________________________ From: MSU Network Administrators Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Michael A. Zakhem Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2007 3:46 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: [MSUNAG] virtual hosting service questions and comments We are in fact looking at offering a virtual hosting solution as a collaborative effort between ACNS and AIS. One of the goals is to be able to offer a virtual hardware service to the MSU community. However, we are in the early stages of looking into this and have not worked out all the details as to structure, cost and policy. In the next few months, we hope to nail these issues down. As we do so, we plan to engage NAG and other campus IT administrators as to what they might be looking for in this kind of service and how it can be delivered most effectively. As to your suggestions Tim, they all make good sense and are things that we would use to implement a virtualization solution. If any one else is interested in talking about how they are using virtualization or how it may help them, please respond to this thread. Like I said above, we are interested in getting people together to talk. Mike - Michael A. Zakhem Team Leader, Systems Integration Academic Computing and Network Services Michigan State University 316 Computer Center East Lansing, MI 48824 tel: 517/432-4925 fax: 517/353-9060 On Thu, 2007-12-13 at 14:25 -0500, Tim Barney wrote: We need a virtual hosting service to buy virtual servers from instead of buying and maintaining our own hardware. My group is eager to avail ourselves of virtual hosts rather than our own hardware. Maintaining hardware is not in our charter and is a distraction. I hear there is interest in ACNS in developing such a service someday. What's going on? I hope there is someone working on setting up a vmware service. When might we expect to have a service available? I can appreciate the technical tasks to be worked out in setting this up. Perhaps the policy tasks would present the most difficult part of this. For instance: I'm not a budget type person, but from what little I hear it might be easier for clients to spend a fixed amount of money instead of a monthly fee, depending on where the money comes from. When a physical machine is purchased, we get approval for a fixed sum, and after 3 years maybe the support is over, but if we don't get more money at least we still have a machine to run our service. With a monthly fee, if our money stream gets reduced or cut after 3 years, then we lose the virtual machine, or the host provider loses money providing our virtual host without the monthly fee. So is it possible to offer a fixed price method that is competitive to buying our own hardware, while still offering a workable business model for ACNS? In anticipation of a logical reply, what we need in a virtual host (VH) is: * our choice of OS * Full console access, secured, to the VH. * variable disk storage - some servers need fast disk access, most can get by with fast network RAID storage (such as low and medium duty web servers, and development systems). * backed up data space, with full and incremental backups performed for Disaster Recovery (DR). * competitive cost to using our own hardware (server, backup, storage) * predictable performance Consider that I have something now that works for me, only it costs me hardware maintenance time, and for that I am willing to concede something, maybe a little money if the cost of a VH was a little higher. But it costs ACNS money for power and cooling all the separate servers in the computer room. So, to ask for the above needs, and maybe one or two more I haven't thought of, is perhaps not asking too much. Combining multiple distinct servers into one superserver just has to have a cost reducing factor to ACNS' costs I would think. IMHO these are suggestions for the implementation: * Use VMware ESX Server 3 (to run on bare metal), get agreement with AIS to use VMware also for future interoperability and mutual DR as well as exchange of technical skills. * use a bare metal implementation, whatever product you use, for performance reasons. * use VMware's VirtualCenter product to effectively manage the site and allow for a real time fail over to an offsite system. This offers an enterprise level of reliability to DR. * offer disks with RAID redundancy, designed to allow for future growth. Think in terms of terabytes initially. Perhaps an ISCSI device might offer enough performance for light and medium duty servers? * Suggest two phases - initial system for webserving and development work to gain experience, and a later system or upgrade to provide for production services requiring more performance. Any comments from ACNS on this? AIS? Tim Barney Lead Programmer vuDAT