Decided to virtualize our development environment at work, my last experience was using GoGrid.com (http://www.gogrid.com/) running about 7 to 9 servers in there mostly out of production.

The pricing model there is a bit high and figured we’d take a shot at setting something up using our boxes for non production. Started to evaluate Xen, VMWare and Amazon.

My Goals were to be able to image our current production environment as much as possible so I can manage through some major upgrades to our systems and be able to do enough testing. I didn’t want to have to setup new web servers, database servers, middleware etc and hope to replicate the environment but rather have it run as close to production as possible with as little hassle setting up since our systems were so complicated.

Xen
I don’t have very much experience with Xen® hypervisor, the powerful open source industry standard for virtualization (http://www.xen.org/) but do like CentOS (http://www.centos.org/)  and read around it was pretty simple. That seemed like a decent approach so it became a candidate.

Amazon Web Services
Ruled out Amazon (http://aws.amazon.com/) after going to Code Camp this year and seeing a fantastic demo on it. I was actually very impressed at their services but again for us I think it was not the right approach. One thing that I found very cool was the Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) http://aws.amazon.com/sqs/. It was pretty slick and in a distributed environment would be so easy to use.

VMWare ESXi
I’ve used VMWare workstation before and found it very easy to use so this solution seemed like a natural way forward. After reading up and talking to several of my fellow nerds decided that VMWare ESXi  (http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi/)would be the way to go. We have an HP Proliant G5 with 2 Quad Cores to run it on and turns out HP really makes is easy to get installed (http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/us/en/servers/4x-servers.html).

Took a while to get it setup, we were shipping the wrong raid controller then the right one with a bad cache module so it seemed like more of a project to get setup but once we got it running we loaded ESXi on there it was really easy to setup.

Now ESXi is free and you can control your server using PowerShell which is pretty cool, but if you want to have some friendlier tools then vSphere is pretty cool. I’m using the 60 evaluation and I really like it and will probably purchase a license for it.
Some of you might wonder why I didn’t mention Microsoft Virtualization products (http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization/en/us/default.aspx). I did see a great demo on Windows Azure and I’m looking at their platform still but for the purpose of having a simple to use, quick to setup and be capable to pushing the changes from Dev, Q&A to production ESXi seemed easy.

Our collocation center is running VMWare for their cloud services so pushing our vmx files to them should be pretty painless. If you haven’t played with it, I’d suggest giving it a try. You can start by getting your hands on VMWare Workstation and using the trial then get a copy of vCenter Converter (https://www.vmware.com/products/converter/) and it makes it really easy to do a hot image of a server windows or linux. One thing I did run into was creating a few images for Workstation and pushing them to our ESXi Datastore. It kept complaining about not being able to open the disk or vmdk files. After googleing around I read that you can create a thin disk like so:



‘convert’ copy a existing virtual disk to thin format:
vmkfstools -i /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/Images/webserver01/large_disk.vmdk -d thin /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/Images/webserver01/new_thin_disk.vmdk

Only thing was they were large discs and took forever. I did also push one directly to the datastore from vCenter.

I think I’m going to put together a few pointers that I struggled with in case anyone else stumbles across this it might help, things to include some nice free tools for managing the virtual machines, creating virtual machines, enabling SSH access to your ESXi server (unsupported mode) and creating a CentOS virtual machine.