Virtual portals can bring some very specific value when building your infrastructure. I don’t want to talk about the value of efficiently using the CPU’s and hardware that you already have or the ability to better manage those resources. That’s great and can be a justification in and of itself. I want to talk about the value it brings to the portal world and believe me it does bring value.
- Bringing up a virtualized portal can be a very quick task. For those of you who have installed a portal and then had to spend obscene amounts of time completing the configuration by hooking to databases and to an LDAP (user repository), you know what I mean. Now you take your copy that’s fully configured and just back it up. Next install could be very quick.
- Cost savings in testing time. A portal is usually tested with other systems. When you make changes to content, add pages, change data in systems or other databases, you move off your gold standard for testing. That means that smart people will have a backup they use to return to the gold standard for testing. In the pre-virtualization days, we would make a request to roll back to our gold version and then wait 3 days while the poor IT guys went back and restored 15 different things. It was a royal pain and if our data sets and testing were any smaller, we would have just done a manual roll back. In the new world, it took two hours. All the IT guys did was run a couple scripts to take down the existing virtual images and bring up the new ones. On one project alone, we must have gotten at least 200-300 hours of time savings.
- Better use of licensing. Nothing is free. At least if they tell you it’s free then you should be looking for the hook. Portal vendors typically charge by the CPU of some version thereof. If you have a development environment that’s sitting idle most of the time, you may have too much processing power devoted to it. With virtualization and many vendors approach to charging $$ by the number of cores in a chip, you now have free reign to use only a portion of a CPU to power your system. Sure you save on hardware but you also save on software. If you have four environments and two of those environments use the equivalent of 1/2 a processor, you just save yourself a chunk of change.
- Virtualization concepts. What I’ve seen over the past 4 years or so is that as portal vendors become more familiar with the concepts, they begin to re-use those concepts in their products. Case in point, the process to install a clustered portal takes many, many steps. It usually involves installing each instance and then bringing them into the cluster. IBM has a process to essentially copy an existing install and then bring it into the cluster. Perficient architects tell me it’s more complicated than that but this concept of copy and bring up quickly has is becoming part of the background expectations and anything that saves time to install or manage a portal can only be good.
So there you have it, some of the reasons I like virtualization on the portal.
