The last couple years have been pretty demanding professionally. I’ll say it right up front; Virtualization technology (even the cheap stuff) saved our cookies. The collision merger of two medium sized companies created a huge workload for small, globally distributed staffs; multiple enterprise wide projects, the need for the immediate implementation of several mainstream technologies, immediate adoption of several fringe technologies and some heavy duty risk taking. Half way through the integration effort, I moved all my local computing facilities into a few Hyper-V virtual machines (which was still in Beta at the time), bought an industrial strength, but affordable, Dell E6500 laptop, stuffed a half-TByte drive and 8 Gigs of RAM in it and went to work.
The group I work with became a focal point for several of these projects less than a month into the merger. Amongst them, we were asked to open wide and embrace re-hosting, into less than 1,200 square feet, several hundred Windows based applications that were living in 16,500 sq feet of data center before the merger. Oh yeah, limited budget. Together with the rest of our victims the business, we all got it packed in there while experiencing every emotional extreme you can imagine. We’re all good friends now but it was touch and go for a while!
It was the classic 10 lbs of the unknown stuffed into a 2 lb bag. We changed our computing platform from conventional to blade systems. We then stuffed 8 virtual servers into each Virtual Server 2005 R2 installation. When we were done, we’d achieved a 32:1 compression ratio. That’s better than your average diesel does, doncha know.
So let me tell you about the good stuff:
- Virtual Server 2005 R2, not great, not perfect but good enough if you limit it to development servers and limited DB hosting. It was also the last hope for moving some applications for a wide variety of problems
- System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Think vCenter (Cadillac) at Hyundai prices.
- Our friends in the new company, former competitors, had seen a much more progressive investment in operating system tech so Physical 2 Virtual (P2V) ops were much easier
- Great people. So many of them aren’t in the new company anymore. Others are. Most of the a**es turned out to be people I was wrong about; they were just as guilty of being proud of their work as I am.
- Hyper-V on the horizon. Hooboy.
The bad stuff is simple
- Wayyyyy too many things to do at once
- Half solutions implemented to get us by
- Design is a word…still. The final design is still being designed
- Windows 2000
- All the talent we let go. I sometimes feel a little cheated to have not had more opportunities to work with them
- Complaints from people who *think* they know your job and are willing to tell you how to do it
So there’s the scenario. Enter the laptop. The first thing I did after I got it was destroy it. If you look at the specs on the E6500, you’ll see it’s a long battery life machine with some massive specs for 2008. It hosted everything beautifully. It stopped being a laptop.
Here’s why.
When you put Hyper-V on a system, you lose the ability to Sleep and Hibernate your machine. You lose access to all the great PnP goodness of Bluetooth, USB, and the rest of the laptop conveniences you’ve become accustomed to. You have turned your laptop into a small, portable server. That’s cool but you’re definitely the oddball on the airplane you’re riding home tonight. But, let me tell ya, this Hyper-V thing does it well, affordably and flexibly. Thank the graces I didn’t sign the VMWare partnership papers.
So what brought all this gushing from my mind?
Windows 7
Yes, I have a Mac, an iPod, a Zune, a couple Ubuntu (still waiting for Crusty Camper to release) machines, an old Sun Ultra 2 running Sol 9. You may freely call me a tech whore. It’s okay. I know you mean it in a nice way. But none of them compare to this.
While I liked Vista, this Windows 7 thing
is still a huge leap forward.
My battery literally goes 8 hours now (that don’t happen, man, when you’re running Hyper-V). When I leave work, I put my machine to sleep. When I get home, I press the power button and am running again in seconds. Hours later, I put it to sleep again. In the morning, there’s still power, lots of it so it never goes to Hibernate before I’m plugged in again.
Windows 7 is much faster and smoother than Vista was on this host. It’s much faster than Windows Server 2008 was too. I’ve really cottoned to the way the taskbar works and Windows XP mode, while much slower than Hyper-V and limited to 32 bit, is a much easier alternative to the weirdo network configurations I created on my Frankentop under Hyper-V.
I’m enjoying computing again. I’m enjoying my job more. I need my locally installed OS to get it done now. I can still run virtual machines, albeit not as fast and I get all the utility a laptop promises.
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