The VMs are Greener on the Other Side of the Fence By Vinay Pai published: Monday, July 28 2008
Recently I moved to the other side of
the table. Now, I'm a consumer rather than a producer of enterprise
software. In my new role as VP Product Development at PayCycle, my
team is responsible for developing and deploying a SaaS
implementation for small-business payroll with 75,000 customers. Over
the coming months, I will provide insight from an end-user's
perspective.
Last month, I wrote about how desktop
virtualization, such as VMware's VDI, is not a cost-effective
solution. As it turns out, my IT director, Daniel, at PayCycle had
gone through a similar evaluation with his team, prior to my joining
PayCycle. We're currently a VMware shop, mostly using VMware ESX
Server in our development environment and corporate IT functions.
However, we have a fairly significant call-center / support team that
requires access to e-mail, office applications, and a web-based
call-center application. Daniel had initially provisioned $50k-$60k
to implement VDI for this support team. However, he decided to delay
this effort since the economics didn't make sense, after factoring
in the costs of server upgrades and the VDI software itself. Since
desktops are a commodity, we're spending ~$500 per user in the
support team, and the management costs are still pretty contained.
Granted, this price doesn't represent the TCO after factoring in
the IT support costs in either model. Later this year, Daniel and I
will analyze of our current support costs to develop a TCO model.
Now, we are expanding our use of
virtualization in the development team and also looking at ways to
virtualize our production environment. Our development environment is
J2EE (or Java Enterprise these days), and all of my developers run an
app server on their laptop. Recently, we've started transitioning
developers to virtual machines for their desktop environment, and
these VMs are hosted by IT on Dell 1950's with 8 cores and 32 GB
RAM. Based on initial performance tests, the VM-based development
environment outperforms the laptop-based environment. Also, the setup
process is much faster. A VM-based development environment with the
app server, database server, build tools, and IDE can be provisioned
with a simple helpdesk request. Voila!
We're now starting to investigate the
use of virtualization in our production environment. Our current
deployment hardware is due for a refresh, and the latest servers have
so much horsepower that we can take advantage of server consolidation
while improving service levels.
For now, we're managing our VMs
through the tools provided by VMware, but we're not using VMotion,
DRS, or any of the high-dollar options. The low-end stuff works just
fine. We haven't needed live migration for any of the VMs in our
development environment, and we do bring down the development VMs for
maintenance during the week. So far, none of the developers have
complained. For now, my development head count is just shy of 50, and
our production and development environments can be managed with the
standard management tools supplied by the vendor. We'll see how our
needs change as we grow and start to deploy virtualization in
production. Stay tuned.
Related Links: VMware , PayCycle ,
Vinay Pai is an accomplished
development manager with 20 years of experience in the technology
industry. As the Vice President Product Development at PayCycle, he
leads the development and deployment of online payroll services for
small business. Vinay’s responsibilities include development, QA,
and IT. During the past 10 years, Vinay has held various management
roles in Cassatt, Sun Microsystems, and Schlumberger. Most recently,
as the VP of Product Engineering at Cassatt, Vinay led the definition
and launch of a new product line that helps enterprises manage their
data center resources more efficiently. As a senior engineering
manager at Sun Microsystems, Vinay was responsible for several Java,
XML, and Web Services technologies. At Schlumberger, Vinay developed
real-time engineering software in Tulsa and Austin and then lead a
new development team in Paris, France. Vinay has also worked for IBM
and EDS and had founded Victory Software, a small start-up that
developed game software.
Vinay holds MS Electrical Engineering,
BS Electrical Engineering, and BA Computer Science degrees from Rice
University. Vinay is an avid golfer who also enjoys skiing, tennis,
and coaching basketball.
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