First, a little background on me:
I have 15 years experience in managing a “traditional” corporate network, but over the last 10 years, the traditional network has changed, with the greatest advances in the last 5 years with the “virtualization revolution”
Seemingly every CIO and network manager was clambering over one another to virtualize large parts of the corporate estate using a variety of technologies from the likes of VMWare, Microsoft and Citrix.
Around 5 years ago I started a project to virtualize the computing requirements of a UK local authority, which comprised of some 60 physical servers running workloads such as AD, Exchange, GIS, finance and a whole host of other legacy business apps”.
We were there at the start of Hyper-V and we felt a lot of pain when certain aspects did not live up to expectations, but the release of 2008 R2 solved a great many problems, and I remain convinced it is a great platform for a windows shop.
Moving to a virtual estate meant a great many changes in how we did normal things like backing up, applying updates, restarting servers, but the principle was always the same… test changes, deploy out of hours, test again, and hope rollback is not required.. or worse still a restore.
Not to go too deep into a potential article for another day, we had a major failure once and Microsoft DPM saved our bacon, but restoring VMs is always a worrying and stressful ordeal.
Then I changed jobs, and my entire way of thinking….
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