Better living through Virtualization

Several years back when I started at a new company, I was told it would take me a year to get up to speed, and there was no real documentation on common tech support issues. I started begging, pleading, and bugging for information, taking copious notes along the way. I came ‘up to speed’ in less than half the time they expected. All these notes were invaluable to me, and I realized others could benefit from them as well. And thus, on an old Pentium III no one cared about, a wiki was born.

The wiki grew with information, and became useful in unexpected ways, such as enabling other departments to look up common parts so they didn’t have to transfer the customer to tech support just to get a part number. The wiki even got slightly better hardware, upgrading to a Pentium IV with dual HD so it was a bit more protected than before from hardware failure.

Alas, with my busy schedule the maintenance went neglected and it chugged along running Ubuntu 6.10 server. Wanting to do some spring cleaning, I decided to update the server. Due to what seems to be a bug with Ubuntu of the day, deleted files on the /var drive were never removed, and the update of the OS put the system to it’s doom.

This is why you have backups, and I certainly had them. I decided to wait for a few torturous days (it really proved just how valuable the wiki was to people I did not even realize used it) to let Ubuntu 9.10 LTS come out. But I also took the opportunity to make the system more robust in the future.

VMwareis certainly the 800 pound gorilla of the virtualization world, and there is nothing wrong with that, but I have been a fan of VirtualBox almost since it’s inception. Little things like using SATA drivers instead of SCSI are quite nice, and I guess I am simply more familiar with it at this point.

So to make things relatively easy on myself (restoration of the wiki was in high demand) I went with 2 copies of Ubuntudesktop, one for the hardware and one virtualized. Uses more resources than necessary, but made it very easy for me to set up quickly and the wiki itself doesn’t need much power to run. To save on our often tight internet bandwidth, I actually did most of the initial install, setup, and configuration at home and exported the OS to a USB drive to bring into the office to add data and do final configuration.

Now not only do I have the ability to move the system to new hardware when it becomes available, (I am pushing for a ‘real’ server which I will endeavor to run VirtualBox via command line) I can easily clone the server for backup and to test things like future updates. If it ever goes down again, my base image plus a backup can have it running again in mere minutes.

Recently, I have been given a new project, to find a way to distribute our customer VPN base to our field techs so we can do 24/7 remote support. However, distributing such sensitive data to systems that are mobile and therefore easily lost, as well as in unknown states of security is what you might call a very bad idea.

Enter virtualization again. By virtualizing the entire VPN system, our people can Remote Desktop over our corporate VPN to remote into our customer base. Not only does the information stay securely inside our corporate network, new configurations are easily deployed. Another huge benefit is that most VPN configurations send all data to the remote endpoint, which disconnects active local sessions. Normally this would cause the systems to disconnect our employees, but as they will remote into the host OS, they will retain full control over the remote even after the VPN is established.

I just love tech, while sometimes needlessly complicated, the whole point of it is to make lives easier and has shown consistent movement towards that goal. Even just a few years ago, the ease of administration and benefit to users and overall cost virtualization brings was a pipe dream. Now almost anyone can do it.