Virtual insanity: the ugly side of virtualisation

The verdict is in, and virtualisation is the answer, no matter what the question. Nobody wants to waste time fixing busted PCs and busted file servers anymore. Well nobody wants to pay us to fix the things any longer.

Can’t say we blame them either, since we’re not nearly as good at it as we used to be – or else the software is getting way too patchy to be stable. The hardware doesn’t break these days like it used to, but nobody wants a room full of noisy fans and hot hard drives either.

And there goes the margins again. Well, really, there goes the sales of PCs except for homebodies, and they always want way too much support for the price they’re not prepared to pay. Instead, the business IT buyers want big tough servers that can’t be killed easily, so they can run two or three virtual servers and a dozen virtual desktops on the one box. Here at Rabid we specialise in ‘white box’ kit although it hasn’t been white for a long time. In fact we can’t recall it ever being white. Once was beige. Now is mostly black. Anyway, we decided to put together a nice fat unkillable server for our virtual customers – if you get our drift.

After perusing the parts catalogues we soon had a list of goodies that would make us competitive with the big-name vendors. Motherboards with room for a couple of CPUs and gobs of ECC memory. Dual power supplies. RAID arrays for storage. Mirrored boot drives. Dual GigaLAN cards. That should do it. Of course, all this stuff needs a nice big black tower case to house it all. Should be really professional. We’ll let the nephew, Sk8er Boi, order the bits, since he’s totally drooling over the specs and muttering something about command and conquer. Good to see him with a positive sales attitude.

All the bits arrived pretty quick from the distis, they’ve certainly got their act together these days. And Sk8er Boi didn’t take long to put the pieces of the puzzle together, but we did think he was being a bit melodramatic making us walk into the back room blindfolded while he revealed the masterpiece.

But when he removed our blinkers to reveal our secret weapon in the virtual sales wars we nearly cried. No, not from happiness. The thing was blue. Well, it wasn’t painted blue, but there was blue light oozing out from every orifice and every fan was a swirl of blue. And you could see every fan too since the sides were clear perspex.

OK, our fault. Should have been more specific. Should have said PLAIN black box, not just BIG black box. Who on earth is going to put this glowing, belching, pulsating, howling thing in their office and call it a virtual server? Nothing very virtuous about it that’s for sure. The nephew assures us it’s what every gamer dreams of, but they’re not likely to buy it either since we didn’t install liquid cooling for the over-clocked CPUs. Yeah, we didn’t know what he was on about either but apparently gamers do this all the time. And they want to buy the thing in bits to build their own box anyway. Another great idea rendered virtually useless.

Maybe we could get the side panels screen-printed with the customer’s name. A combination neon sign and virtual server.

Anybody want to buy a virtual server you hang from the awning to advertise your business? Anybody think of a business that wants to advertise with a huge bank of flashing lights and also needs a server? Virtually anyone?

Gotta go!

Customers virtually waiting!

collaboration insanity networking of side the ugly virtual virtualisation