Understanding the IT environment

[Zeldy]

If this is the wrong thread, feel free to move it - I'm hoping for this to be like a Q+A of guidance as I'm trying to learn about the entire world of IT
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I work for an IT reseller and solution provider - I like to not take things at face value and like to understand what I'm selling in order to speak naturally and as I like to call it "breezy" with customers about their internal IT environment.

I don't really want to say where I work as they have some software that monitors the interwebs for every time their name is mentioned by the marketing team. Happy to say it in private if people are interested.

They do everything under the IT spectrum and its my task to sell it and showcase their value add by solution selling and bringing in the relevant specialist team to take over.

At the minute, the area I'm most apprehensive about is virtualistion. I'm getting into conversations with customers about how many servers they have and what vendor - but I'm meant to ask if they're planning to virtualise. I have a sortof idea from training (like 1 powerpoint for each service/team) and it didn't really stick with me.

I'm also trying to learn networking aswell if anyone can shed some light on what that sortof means too.

I'd really appreciate anything you have, if there's any techies on here - or perhaps where to go to find out? :)

[Mirage]

Are you asking for an explanation on what virtualization is and why customers should want it?

Virtualization makes server management, scaling, moving and redundancy easier to deal with. Because the virtualised servers operate inside a sandbox on the actual hardware, the entire "sandbox" they exist inside can be moved to a different physical machine and the server wouldn't even know it had been moved.

It makes it possible to simply transfer a server with all its settings and data to a different physical location without having to lift your butt off your chair, and the server could be copied and put on additional hardware machines if the customer should temporarily require more processing power than they usually need.

The entire virtual machine can also be moved to a different hardware machine temporarily in case the piece of hardware it was originally running on should require serious maintenance. In practice, you can "send" a complete pre-configured server from a datacenter in England to a datacenter in Texas by simply pressing some buttons on a keyboard and wait for a few files to get transferred over the internet.

While it is true that one non-virtualized server can do a myriad of tasks, if you instead make several virtual servers on that same piece of hardware, and give each virtual server its own task, the setup will be more robust because changes made to one part of the system won't affect the other parts as easily, which would make it easier to troubleshoot problems with a server's configuration. Additionally, if the security of one of the virtual servers is breached, the intruder won't get access to the other functions as easily, as each virtual machine can't even know whether or not there are other virtual machines running on the same piece of hardware, and even someone with administrative privileges of one of the VMs can't get out of the sandbox that one machine is in.

One of the drawbacks to virtualizing many machines with few tasks each is that there is some wasted RAM, as multiple copies of the same operating system needs to run on one physical machine, but this isn't a very big deal as RAM is relatively cheap, and most of the RAM is consumed by the services and applications run by the OS, not the OS itself.

Learning "networking" is kind of a fuzzy thing to say, as that is a very wide area of knowledge. What is it you need to learn about it specifically?

[Zeldy]

Not really, I find that that comes after understanding in just an overview form exactly what virtualision means. I just want to have an entry level understanding to speak about it naturally.

I can keep up generally with IT talk I just struggle piecing it all together in my head!

[Mirage]

oh so my post didn't really help then :(

[Zeldy]

oh so my post didn't really help then :(

Its a great help. You must have edited it since I viewed it.

I'm still ingesting your comments and trying to get my head around it. I found learning about end user devices the most difficult. I'm aware of virtual machines, I have a citrix app on this laptop to work from home.

I'll have a think and correlate some questions that I'm pondering - I'm very impressed with your technical knowledge!

[Mirage]

I'm not sure if Citrix is too similar. I haven't used Citrix in a decade, however. Last time i checked, Citrix just streams an application from a server to you, so that's a different kind of thing.

[Zeldy]

I'm not sure if Citrix is too similar. I haven't used Citrix in a decade, however. Last time i checked, Citrix just streams an application from a server to you, so that's a different kind of thing.

I can access a virtual desktop, it's my display from work just on my laptop, like a machine in a machine? access to my emails, browser, files.

[Zeldy]

Are you asking for an explanation on what virtualization is and why customers should want it?

Virtualization makes server management, scaling, moving and redundancy easier to deal with. Because the virtualised servers operate inside a sandbox on the actual hardware, the entire "sandbox" they exist inside can be moved to a different physical machine and the server wouldn't even know it had been moved.

I like the bold line, that's a perfect thing that I can just say when the topic arises.

It makes it possible to simply transfer a server with all its settings and data to a different physical location without having to lift your butt off your chair, and the server could be copied and put on additional hardware machines if the customer should temporarily require more processing power than they usually need.

The entire virtual machine can also be moved to a different hardware machine temporarily in case the piece of hardware it was originally running on should require serious maintenance. In practice, you can "send" a complete pre-configured server from a datacenter in England to a datacenter in Texas by simply pressing some buttons on a keyboard and wait for a few files to get transferred over the internet.

Is this where companies would require either an external hosting company - or would this be a case of hosting on the cloud? If I hear a customer looking to virtualise, that's when I'd engage the datacentre team, so this all makes sense

While it is true that one non-virtualized server can do a myriad of tasks, if you instead make several virtual servers on that same piece of hardware, and give each virtual server its own task, the setup will be more robust because changes made to one part of the system won't affect the other parts as easily, which would make it easier to troubleshoot problems with a server's configuration. Additionally, if the security of one of the virtual servers is breached, the intruder won't get access to the other functions as easily, as each virtual machine can't even know whether or not there are other virtual machines running on the same piece of hardware, and even someone with administrative privileges of one of the VMs can't get out of the sandbox that one machine is in.

Why would you have several virtual servers? When do people need more than one and why? What applications or servers would you be running - things like SQL? I don't think I know of any others.

One of the drawbacks to virtualizing many machines with few tasks each is that there is some wasted RAM, as multiple copies of the same operating system needs to run on one physical machine, but this isn't a very big deal as RAM is relatively cheap, and most of the RAM is consumed by the services and applications run by the OS, not the OS itself.

Learning "networking" is kind of a fuzzy thing to say, as that is a very wide area of knowledge. What is it you need to learn about it specifically?

I don't really know, this is the thing. Its networking and security combined, that's the team I have to plug for that. Does networking mean things like Sharepoint?

[Mirage]

I'm not sure exactly what your customers need, but if for example your customer is an enormous travel agency, they might need more server resources around the holiday seasons than the rest of the year. With virtual machines, they can easily scale up and down their infrastructure, and not have to pay for hardware that is basically not doing anything off-season, allowing you to sell the spare processing power on those idle servers to other customers, and reduce costs for both your company and your customers.

Setting up several virtual machines might not be super relevant for all situations and customers, but for example: If you have one rack server with two processors that have 8 cores each, and a total of 48 GB of RAM and you need to run a database server or two, a web server or two, maybe a domain name server, you *could* run all these servers on one single operating system that had access to all 16 cores and 48 gigs of RAM. However, if there is a security issue in for example one of the database programs, that could let an intruder gain access over all the other services on that machine as well.

If you instead had 3 virtual machines on that single physical machine, you could reserve 6 cores and 16 GB RAM to one VM that handled all the databases, 6 cores and 10 GB to the web servers, and run the rest of the services on a VM that was given the remaining resources, even if someone managed to break into the database servers, they would be unable to get into the other two machines, or any of the services running on them. Also, if one of the database applications simply had a sort of a bug that would for no apparent reason cause system instability, that instability would be contained within the virtual machine it was running in, and not affect the rest of the hardware where the other services were running. It would be easier to see what caused the issue, and easier and faster to fix it.

The cloud is again sort of a fuzzy term. If a customer uses a datacenter for in example citrix applications that their users can access from any device they might have, whether it be in their homes or at work or on the go, this is already technically "the cloud", no matter how the actual server setup that allows for this is configured. When I use dropbox or google drive on my different devices, this is also using "the cloud", even if it is a very different type of service.


I also don't really work with this sort of stuff. I just play around with virtual machines on my home computer :p. I've got like two different VMs running on my desktop computer now, in addition to my normal windows 7 that i do most stuff in. I also have 5 inactive virtual machines all with different operating systems on that i can boot up anytime i need them. I personally use them to test out new things without risking breaking my main system :p, or to run programs that aren't supported by my main OS.

For example, I use my Linux VM to run linux applications that do not work on Windows, even if that linux VM is running inside windows. This isn't exactly how VMs are used in enterprise situations, however. You don't run the VMs "inside" a normal windows installation for the most part. Instead you use a very specialized OS that is built for the sole purpose of hosting other, more fully featured operating systems. These operating systems are known as "hypervisors" rather than OSes.

This is how it looks when you do it on a desktop pc. it can be pretty fun :p
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1132077/images/Screenshot%202016-03-15%2023.39.11.png

None of those other two operating systems are able to interact with my main windows. Viruses that might infect my windows XP on the right side have no way of getting into my main windows installation. Unless I do something really dumb.

[Old Manus]

You might want to read around Infrastructure as a service (http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/definition/Infrastructure-as-a-Service-IaaS) (if only because it's a nice buzzword to throw around) if you're learning about virtualisation. Inf/Platform/Software as a Service seem to be the big thing to be into at the moment as far as flogging web services are concerned, if all the conferences I've been to where they rave about it are anything to go by.

[Zeldy]

You might want to read around Infrastructure as a service (http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/definition/Infrastructure-as-a-Service-IaaS) (if only because it's a nice buzzword to throw around) if you're learning about virtualisation. Inf/Platform/Software as a Service seem to be the big thing to be into at the moment as far as flogging web services are concerned, if all the conferences I've been to where they rave about it are anything to go by.

It's funny you should say that - well, entirely relevant I spose - we had training the other day on how they've restructured the managed services team and it includes Platform/Back up/Cloud as a service. Cloud in this context is interchangable with infrastructure.

This is making sense to me now. Had a managed print services conference call today - not got any questions at the moment. Need to think of networking and datacentre next.

[Zeldy]

I'm not sure exactly what your customers need, but if for example your customer is an enormous travel agency, they might need more server resources around the holiday seasons than the rest of the year. With virtual machines, they can easily scale up and down their infrastructure, and not have to pay for hardware that is basically not doing anything off-season, allowing you to sell the spare processing power on those idle servers to other customers, and reduce costs for both your company and your customers

What would be your thoughts on a SaaS traffic management system instead? That's what my last company took to market.

I think I'm able to comprehend server conversations now. To a customer with one server I would ask around security, back-up, disaster recovery - any other key areas I'm missing?