1

My college uses VMware. To what extent I am not sure.

The issue is that they have the main student access website down every night from 12am to 6am for upgrades.

To my understanding using VMware will allow you to keep the site up while upgrades are being performed on another instance, then just switched over when upgrades have passed testing.

Am I correct in my understanding of this?

I use VMware Player and find it quite amazing, but have not had any experience with the business side of VMware.

Thank you for any advice in this. I am writing an email to the administration and would like to have something quantitative to say about the operations of VMware.

SUB

Hennes
  • 65,804
  • 7
  • 115
  • 169
subcan
  • 113

1 Answers1

2

The VMWare feature you are referring to is called "vMotion", which is made available by their vSphere product. From their website, VMotion lets you:

Eliminate application downtime from planned server maintenance by migrating running virtual machines between hosts.

So you're correct in thinking that

  • if it's the host infrastructure that needed maintenance, and
  • if your University is using VMWhare vSphere, and
  • if the daily maintenance is done in phases that keeps other hosts up, and
  • if there were enough of those other hosts, and
  • if the operations was designed, configured, and staffed for this, and
  • then its certainly possible that vMotion would let you continue to have access to VMs while maintenance was performed.

But that's an awful lot of speculation. Why don't you just ask them what they are really doing for six hours each night, and what you could do to help make sure some systems are still available?

ckhan
  • 8,454
  • 2
  • 19
  • 16