VMware Virtualization for Support and Infrastructure

I would like to talk a bit about how we use VMware technology to provide remote support for our clients. We provide remote Oracle database and E-business suite support for our clients, each of which provide a unique environment in which we need to work. With a wide range of VPN solutions being implemented by our clients, we needed to come up with an efficient and cost-effective solution to manage multiple VPN software clients on our laptops and PC's. We have found that by using VMware's solutions, we can minimize the amount of configurations and software needed on an employees machine, and save time and money in the process.

For each client, we create one or more virtual machines and install the necessary tools and applications to support their environment. Here is a breakdown of some of the software installed on each virtual machine:

- operating system (usually Windows XP)
- an Office Suite (MS Office or OpenOffice)
- ClamAV anti-virus software
- VMware tools
- Oracle SQL Developer
- VPN Client

We have several images or base installs configured that have most of the components listed above already installed. We also follow "VMware Server guest OS performance tips" to speed up performance of our Windows guests.

When a ticket is created by a client that requires an employee to check or fix an issue in the client's environment, he or she can connect directly to a VMware Server using the VMware Console and create a secure VPN connection from the virtual machine to the client that needs support. Since we use Windows XP guests, only one person can use each virtual machine at a time, so we may create several virtual machines for each client to allow more than one employee to connect to a client at a time.

For employees out of the office, they simply need to have our VPN client installed on their machine, connect to our internal network and then connect to the VMware Console and to the appropriate virtual machine to do their work. At times this can be a little slow, but so far we have found that this works well for most situations. For some clients that demand dedicated support, we do install VMware Player or VMware Workstation on some laptops to speed the support process up and enable us to better meet our service level agreements.

This environment also provides segregation and security for our clients, as each virtual machine can connect to only the client it is intended for and minimizes the risk of making a change to the wrong client environment. To connect to a client environment, the employee must log in to the VMware Console using a client specific id that ensures that they are conencting to the correct virtual machine.

We also use VMware Server to enable us to have multiple guest server OS's installed on a single physical server to mimic the various environments and products that we support. This allows us to better server our clients and allows ouor employees "sandboxes" to try out upgrades, patches and new software with minimal impact on our clients' resources.

Open Source Tools Part II - Bugzilla

This post will discuss our usage of Bugzilla for our issue/ticket tracking. Bugzilla was originally created to track software defects, but we have found that it is also very useful for tracking trouble tickets for our external support organization. We did have to make some modifications for it to fit our model, but it definitely works well for us. It has a great search capability, and reporting is straightforward and fairly robust.

It relies on a MySQL database to store the ticket information. It has security features that allow us to segregate our customers so they can only see the tickets that they report, and we can have different application sets for each client to ease assignments.

When we started using it a few years ago, there were not a lot of F/OSS tools that we found for issue tracking as there are today. We have considered moving to a program better suited for application support, as our upgrade path can be challenging due to some of our customizations, but for now we are happy with our system.