Virtualization in the Network Designer’s Toolbox

I’ve found virtualization increasingly useful in my work. I thought I’d share my observations on effectively using virtualization for feature testing, architecture validation, and learning. Virtualization is a very inexpensive way to accomplish tasks that previously required thousands of dollars in lab equipment.

The first decision in employing virtualization is selection where to establish your test environment. The advantage of using a dedicated server is that your applications aren’t competing for resources with the test environment. You can get a server with a lot of memory, which I would advise if you plan on using many virtual machines simultaneously. I prefer Ubuntu Server LTS for headless servers. Ubuntu provides a very stable host OS.

An alternative is creating the virtual environment on your laptop. This comes in very handy if you find yourself without Internet connectivity or you deliver a demo to customers. If you are at a customer site, do not expect to be able to reach your server. There are too many problems that can arise. For my needs, I maintain virtualized labs on both my laptop and office server.

For software, I recommend purchasing VMware Workstation 7.1. VirtualBox has its uses; however, Workstation is a better option. It has features not available in VirtualBox. Let’s take a look.

• Teaming – Workstation lets you set up a group of VMs in a way that makes it easier to manage the virtual infrastructure. You do things such as start and stop all the VMs in the team. Over time, you end having numerous VMs for different purposes. The ability to group VMs into teams is a convenience.
• VM Recording/Playback – This is an excellent feature for creating demos.
• Virtual Network Editor – Creating the virtual network infrastructure is very simple in Workstation. When you combine teaming with the virtual network editor, you can set up new labs very quickly.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.