I’ve been busy with a project to link a number of VMware sites to a centralized Virtual Center Server. With the upgrade to ESXi 6.5 U1 across the board, it meant that the use of the Virtual Center Server Appliance would have to implemented. Initially I was a bit skeptical, as I’d always worked with Virtual Center running on a Windows Server, but running the VCSA became a necessity as this was the particular direction that VMware were heading in.
It got me to thinking about what benefit a virtual appliance would be for a company or an admin in any particular field, and was certainly not something I had considered when designing solutions for clients either (preferring the hardware route).
So, what is a virtual appliance? Essentially it is a virtual machine that is already configured for a particular use case, and ready to be deployed on some sort of virtualization layer. No deploying an underlying OS or physical server before installing the application and configuring. It’s ready to go immediately. And why should you choose an appliance over an application that needs underlying hardware or an OS on which to be installed?
Being preconfigured significantly speeds up the deployment of an application in that it’s as simple as downloading the appliance, and then importing it into the hypervisor running on your site. The only significant hardware changes you need to make would be to add additional memory or CPU, depending on your deployment requirements, which in turn can be done within minutes. Instead of bringing an application into a productive state in a couple of days, this can be done within a couple of hours, saving time and allowing more for any troubleshooting requirements.
Appliances nowadays offer the same, if not more, functionality than stand-alone applications or previous appliances, and this means you’re able to do more essentially with less. By deploying an appliance you can be assured you won’t be done in by being limited in what you can do.
Costs should be cheaper too as an additional Operating System license is not required. For instance, running an application like SEP on a Windows server requires the purchase of a Windows license, and yearly maintenance. Contrast this with an appliance that generally runs some flavor of Linux OS where the license is either free, or already included in the purchase price, and you can start to constrain costs, even if it is a minimal amount. Running as an appliance allows you to save on additional hardware as long as you have the capacity to run this on your virtual platform.
From a virtualization perspective, it now becomes easier to back up the full appliance with your choice of backup software, leading to faster backup and restore times. Disaster Recovery of an appliance is easier as well as it’s as simple as selecting the VM for replication to another client site, or the cloud. The VM could conceivably be up-and-running within minutes, with an RPO much lower than the previous night’s backups if you use an array’s snapshot capabilities.
Finally, a virtual appliance is not limited to only being installed on a local infrastructure. Cloud providers like AWS and Azure offer the ability to deploy Symantec appliances directly onto your cloud infrastructure, and if you have connectivity between your cloud provider and onsite infrastructure, get the full benefits of running the appliance across your entire environment. This makes perfect business sense if you are leaning towards a hybrid cloud, or full cloud environment. Simply select the appliance from the marketplace, and deploy it within minutes.
In the last part of this series I will discuss some of the gotchas to deploying an appliance that you should be watching out for in order to make this a success.