More virtual machines

Continued from: Virtualization Adventure

I was now successfully up and running with VMWare ESXi 3.5. (Version 4 wasn't out yet.) Things went so smoothly with setting up my first machine, I couldn't wait to try another. It didn't take long for the next opportunity to arise.

I have some machines that I need to connect to remotely. They are located on the networks of other organizations, so I have no control over the VPN mechanism by which I connect to these systems. As a result, I have the "privilege" of utilizing Novell, Cisco, and Citrix to access these various machines. As you can imagine, there are some challenges with using all of these vpn clients. I found that if I installed both the Novell and the Cisco client on the same machine, the result was that neither of them ended up working. The Citrix client would connect from my system, but then it wouldn't run the RDP (remote desktop protocol) to pull up the remote server. If I connected to either the Cisco or the Novell vpn servers, then all of my local connections would be severed thereby causing any local jobs that require network access to crash.

The solution (prior to virtualization) was to have 2 machines dedicated to vpn client connections. (Citrix plays nicely with either one, so I could just run my Citrix connections from either of these machines.) The difficulty arose from my VNC (Virtual Network Connection).  VNC allows you to look at the desktop of a computer on your network without having to sit in front of the physical machine.  I tried connecting to these virtual machines via VNC, and then connecting to the VPN servers.  The problem was, once I was connected to the VPN servers, it severed my local connections, thereby disconnecting my VNC so I couldn't access the client computer.  Our workaround was to use a Raritan KVM solution that was awkward at best.

Virtual machines to the rescue!  I set up 2 Windows XP vm's.  One for Novell and one for Cisco and Citrix.  I no longer had the problem of losing my kvm, because the VMWare client has its own console program that works very nicely.

Other virtual machines quickly followed: a backup domain controller, a legacy Windows 2000 server box that we needed to run some old image processing software, and a dedicated workstation for one of our remote employees to use.  None of these were really mission critical operations so all was running nicely, even without redundancy in this setup.

Coming soon: Investigation for a step up