Category Archives: Linux

Best Practices, Business of IT, Linux

Rethinking Long Term Support Releases

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Traditionally Long Term Support operating system releases have been the bulwark of enterprise deployments.  This is the model used by IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Suse and Red Hat and has been the conventional thinking around operating systems since the beginning of support offerings many decades ago.

It has been common in the past for both servers and desktop operating system releases to follow this model, but in the Linux space specifically we began to see this get shaken up where less formal products were free to experiment with more rapid, unsupported or simply unstructured releases.  In the primary product space, openSuse, Fedora and Ubuntu all provided short term support offerings or rapid release offerings. Instead of release cycles measured in years and support cycles closing in on a decade they shorted release cycles to months and support to just months or a few years at most.

In the desktop space, getting new features and applications sooner, instead of focusing primarily on stability as was common on servers, often made sense and brought the added benefit that new technologies or approaches could be tested on faster release cycle products before being integrated into long term support server products.  Fedora, for example, is a proving ground for technologies that will, after proving themselves, make their way into Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases.  By using Fedora, end users get features sooner, get to learn about RHEL technologies earlier and Red Hat gets to test the products on a large scale before deploying to critical servers.

Over time the stability of short term releases has improved dramatically and increasingly these systems are seen as viable options for server systems.  These systems get newer enhancements, features and upgrades sooner which is often seen as beneficial.

A major benefit of any operating system is their support ecosystem, including the packages and libraries that are supported and provided as part of the base operating system.  With long term releases, we often see critical packages aging dramatically throughout the life of the release which can cause problems with performance, compatibility and even security in extreme cases.  This obviously forces users of long term release operating systems to choose between continuing to live with the limitations of the older components or to integrate new components themselves which often breaks the fundamental value of the long term release product.

Because the goal of a long term release is to have stability and integration testing, replacing components within the product to “work around” the limitations of an LTS means that those components are not being treated in an LTS manner and that integration testing from the vendor is no longer happening, most likely, or if it is, not to the same degree.  In effect, what happens is that this becomes a self-built short term release product but with legacy core components and less oversight.

In reality, in most respects, doing this is worse than going directly to a short term release product.  Using a short term or rapid release product allows the vendor to maintain the assumed testing and integration, just with a faster release and support cycle, so that the general value of the long term release concept is maintained and with all components of the operating system, rather than just a few, being updated.  This allows for more standardization, industry testing and shared knowledge and integration than with a partial LTS model.

Maybe the time has come to rethink the value of long term support for operating systems.  For too long, it seems, the value of this approach was simply assumed and followed, and certainly it had and has merits; but the operating system world has changed since this approach was first introduced.  The need for updates has increased while the change rates of things like kernels and libraries have slowed dramatically.  More powerful servers have moved compatibility higher up the stack and instead of software being written to an OS it is often written for a specific version of a language or run time or other abstraction layer.

Shorter release cycles means that systems get features, top to bottom, more often.  Updates between “major” releases are smaller and less impactful.  Changes from updates are more incremental, providing a more organic learning and adaptation curve.  And most importantly the need for replacing system components that are carefully tested and integrated with third party provided versions becomes, effectively, unheard of.

Stability for software vendors remains a value for long term releases and will cause there to be a need for the use of long term releases for a long time to come.  But for the system administrator, the value to this approach seems to be decreasing and, I feel personally, has found an inflection point in recent years.  It used to seem expected and normal to wait two or three years for packages to be updated, but today this feels unnecessarily cumbersome.  It seems increasingly common that higher level components are built with a requirement of newer underlying components; an expectation that operating systems will either be more current or that portions of the OS will be updated separately from the rest.

A heavy reliance on containerization technologies may reverse this trend in some ways, but in ways that always reduce the value of long term releases at the same time.  Containerization reduces the need for extensive capabilities in the base operating system making it easier and more effective to update more frequently for improved kernel, filesystem, driver and container support while leaving libraries and other dependencies in the containers allowing applications that need long term support dependencies to be met in that way and applications that can benefit from newer components to be addressed in that manner.

Of course virtualization has played a role in reducing the value of long term support models by making rapid recovery and duplication of systems trivial.  Stability that we’ve needed long term support releases to address is partially addressed by the virtualization layer; hardware abstraction improves driver stability in very important ways.  In the same vein, devops style support models also reduce the need for long term support and make server ecosystems more agile and flexible.  Trends in system administration paradigms are tending to favour more modern operating systems.

Time will tell if trends continue in the direction that they are headed.  For myself, this past year has been an eye opening one that has seen me move my own workloads from a decade of staunch support for very long term support products to rapid release ones and I must say, I am very happy with the change.

Linux

Linux Distro Release Schedules

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One of the aspects of the Linux work compared to the Windows one is the variety and challenges of different release schedules.  In the Windows world this is pretty simple, there is one product and it releases when it releases, which is roughly once every two years or so.  Everyone working on Windows is very aware of the upcoming releases, when they will happen, when they go into release candidate, when their end of life is and so forth .  It is very clear and very simple.

In the Linux world, this is very different.  Of course, the biggest difference is that Windows is one product, one thing coming from a single vendor.  In Linux we are talking about a “family” of related products from many vendors, some with multiple products.  This is on top of the kernel release schedule that comes from Linux itself – which we will not worry about here.

Each distro is unique and makes its own release decisions.  In fact, release schedule is often a key factor in what defines one distro from another.  For example, all three primary enterprise Linux vendors offer two different products and in all three cases, the differentiation is primarily around release schedule!  So the concept of release schedule is certainly an important one in this marketplace.

There are three primary release “styles” that we find across all operating systems, not only Linux distros: long term release, short term release and rolling release.  Each release style serves a different purpose, but all generally follow a similar set of rules.

The idea of a release is that the packages within a release will not change outside of security and stability patches.  Of course, this is predicated on the behaviour of enterprise vendors as they exist today, any given distro may chosen to follow established norms or not.  There is no inherent rules of the universe that make this behaviour as it is; but it is a strong convention and the concept of a release is based upon this convention.

Long Term Release

This release model is the most common in the general field of enterprise operating systems and is followed outside of Linux by systems like FreeBSD, Solaris, AIX, Mac OSX and Windows.  Long Term Releases, often referred to by LTS, are designed around slow system change rates providing years, sometimes many years, between major system releases allowing IT teams to avoid migrations for much longer and giving software vendors targets that are stable for a long time.

In the enterprise Linux world, all vendors offer at least one Long Term Release products.  These are the most commonly deployed.

From Red Hat the RHEL and CentOS products are long term release with extremely long release cycles – not on a set schedule but currently releasing every three to four years.

Suse has two LTS products: Suse Linux Enterprise Server and openSuse Leap.  SLES maintains a release schedule that is currently between three and five years and openSuse Leap is based relatively closely on the SLES releases.

Ubuntu’s LTS release is conveniently named LTS and releases every two years on the even years, in April, like clockwork.  Ubuntu currently has the shortest release cycle for any LTS product in this category.

All Long Term Releases have minor releases that come out between the major releases and bring small changes or adjustments to the operating systems that are larger than would be appropriate to release with a patch, but are not large enough to justify a release of a new operating system.  The idea of these minor releases is that they are small enough to not be “breaking” allowing software that is targeted at the major release to remain functional throughout the major release cycle.  Major releases are considered “breaking” with large changes such as significant new kernel features, changes in package choices, new compiler features, different libraries, and so forth.

Short Term or Rapid Release

Long term release schedules obviously create problems for those seeking more modern packages and features.  To address this, all enterprise Linux vendors offer a short term release product.

Red Hat provides the Fedora distribution which releases roughly every six months, but with a flexible schedule.  Fedora is not exactly a separate distribution than RHEL and CentOS, but instead every so often a Fedora release is picked to be the “base” for a future RHEL and CentOS release.  The basis is not direct and some packages from later Fedora releases are sometimes added in, some changes are made, but the basics closely match a Fedora release.  The Fedora release is frozen and put through extensive testing before turning into a long term RHEL release.

The Suse family does not use a short term release product and is unique in this.

Ubuntu has a somewhat different strategy from Red Hat.  Ubuntu releases a product every six months, on a very set schedule.  Every fourth release is earmarked as the long term release, the other three are short term releases.  This makes for a far more simple and straightforward system than how Red Hat works with short term release users and long term release users overlapping for six months every two years.

Rolling Release

The more rapid release schedule type is that of the rolling release, which happens basically continuously.  This release strategy is uncommon, but is beginning to be taken more seriously in recent times.  Only Suse with the openSuse Tumbleweed distribution provides an enterprise rolling release system today.  Updates can be as frequent as every couple of days.

Unlike other release schedules which take large groups of packages and “freeze” them as a single release, the rolling release has updates to individual packages coming as they are ready.  So updates are small, but constant.  This allows for simplified adaptation keeping changes to a micro scale, but makes creating a single, predictable target very difficult.

Those looking for the most up to date packages and cutting edge features will find rolling releases to be the best way to keep everything as up to date as possible.

An important understanding of release schedules is that this is not directly tied to either the length of support given to a release nor does it indicate the amount of testing that goes into each release.

Each release style plays an important role in the system ecosystem and by having different styles of release the enterprise Linux world has greater variety and flexibility for addressing a greater range of needs than would otherwise be feasible.

Currently, long term releases are the most prominent and popular in systems administration, but this trend seems unlikely to continue.  The overall stability in the overall enterprise Linux space has increased and the need for currency is so often a more critical concern that more rapid distros are increasingly desired.

 

Best Practices, Career, Linux, Windows

The End of the GUI Era

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We should set the stage by looking at some historical context around GUIs and their role within the world of systems administration.

In the “olden days” we did not have graphical user interfaces on any computers at all, let alone on our servers. Long after GUIs began to become popular on end user equipment, servers still did not have them. In the 1980s and 1990s the computational overhead necessary to produce a GUI was significant in terms of the total computing capacity of a machine and using what little that there was to produce a GUI was rather impractical, if often not even completely impossible. The world of systems administration grew up in this context, working from command lines because there was no other option available to us. It was not common for people to desire GUIs for systems administration, perhaps because the idea had not occurred to people yet.

In the mid-1990s Microsoft, along with some others, began to introduce the idea of GUI-driven systems administration for the entry level server market. At first the approach was not that popular as it did not match how experienced administrators were working in the market. But slowly, as new Windows administrators and to some degree as Novell Netware administrators, began to “grow up” with access to GUI-based administration tools there began to be an accepted place in the server market for these systems. In the mid to late 1990s the UNIX and other non-Windows servers completely dominated the market. Even VMS was a major player still and on the small business and commodity server side Novell Netware was the dominant player mid-decade and still a very serious contender late in the decade. Netware offered a GUI experience but one that was very light and should probably be considered only “semi-GUI” in comparison to Windows NT’s rich GUI experience offered by at least 1996 and to some degree earlier with the NT 3.x family, although Windows NT was only just finding its place in the world before NT 4’s release.

Even at the time, the GUI-driven administration market remained primarily a backwater. Microsoft and Windows still had no major place on the server side but was beginning to make inroads via the small business market where their low cost and easy to use products made a lot sense. But it was truly the late 1990s panic and market expansion brought on by the combination of the Y2K scare, the dotcom market bubble and excellent product development and marketing by Microsoft that a significant growth and shift to a GUI-driven administration market occurred.

The massive expansion of the IT market in the late 1990s meant that there was not enough time or resources to train new people entering IT. The learning curve for many systems, including Solaris and Netware, was very steep and the industry needed a truly epic number of people to go from zero to “competent IT professional” faster than it was possible to do with the existing platforms of the day. The market growth was explosive and there was so much money to be made working in IT that there were no available resources to effectively train new people who needed to be coming into IT as anyone qualified to handle educational duties was also able to earn so much more working in the industry rather than working in education. As the market grew, the value of mature, experienced professionals became extremely high, as they were more and more rare in the ever expanding field as a whole.

The market responded to this need in many ways but one of the biggest ones was to fundamentally change how IT was approached. Instead of pushing IT professionals to overcome the traditional learning curves and develop the needed skills to effectively manage the systems that were on the market at the time, the market changed which tools that they were using to accommodate less experienced and less knowledgeable IT staff. Simpler and often more expensive tools often with GUI interfaces began to flood the market allowing those with less training and experience to at least begin to be useful and productive almost immediately even without ever having seen a product previously.

This change coincided with the natural advancement of the performance of computer hardware. It was during this era that for the first time the power of many systems was such that while the GUI still made a rather significant impact to performance, the lower cost of support staff and speed at which systems could be deployed and managed generally offset this loss of computing capacity taken by the GUI. The GUI rapidly became a standard addition to systems that just a few years before would never have seen one.

To improve the capabilities of these new IT professionals and to rush them into the marketplace the industry also shifted heavily towards certifications, more or less a new innovation at the time, which allowed new IT pros, often with no hands on experience of any kind, to establish some degree of competence and to do so commonly without needing any significant interaction or investment from existing IT professionals like university programs would require. Both the GUI-based administration market, as well as the certification industry, boomed; and the face IT significantly changed.

The result certainly was a flood of new, untrained or lightly trained IT professionals entering the market at a record pace. In the short term this change work for the industry. The field went from dramatically understaffed to relatively well staffed years faster than it could have done so otherwise. But it did not take long before the penalties for this rapid uptake of new people began to appear.

One of the biggest impacts to the industry was that there was an industry-wide “baby boom” with all of the growing pains that that would entail. An entire generation of IT professionals grew up in the boot camps and rapid “certification training” programs of the late 1990s. This resulted in a long term effect of the rules of thumb and general approaches common in that era becoming often codified to the point of near religious belief in a way that previous, as well as later, approaches would not. Often, because education was done quickly and shallowly, many concepts had to be learned by rote without an understanding of the fundamentals behind them. As the “Class of 1998” grew into the senior IT professionals in their companies over time, they became the mentors of new generations and that old rote learning has very visibly trickled down through similar approaches in the years since, even long after the knowledge is outdated or impractical and in many cases it has been interpreted incorrectly and is wrong in predicable ways even for the era from which it sprang.

Part of this learning of the era was a general acceptance that GUIs were not just acceptable but that they were practical and expected. The baby boom effect meant that there was little mentorship from the former era and previously established practices and norms were often swept away. The baby boom effect meant that the industry did not exactly reinvent itself as much as it simple invested itself. Even the concept of Information Technology as a specific industry unto itself took its current form and took hold in the public consciousness during this changing of the guards. Instead of being a vestige or other departments or disciplines, IT came into its own; but it did so without the maturing and continuity of practices that would have existed with more organic growth leaving the industry in possibly a worse position than it might have been would it have developed in a continuous fashion.

The lingering impact of the late 1990s IT boom will be felt for a very long time as it will take many generations for the trends, beliefs and assumptions of that time period to finally be swept away. Slowly, new concepts and approaches are taking hold, often only when old technologies disappear and knew ones are introduced breaking the stranglehold of tradition. One of these is the notion of the GUI being the dominant method by which systems administration is accomplished.

As we pointed out before, the GUI at its inception was a point of differentiation between old systems and the new world of the late 1990s. But since that time GUI administration tools have become ubiquitous in their availability. Every significant platform has and has long had graphical administration options so the GUI no longer sets any platform apart in a significant way. This means that there is no longer any vendor with a clear agenda driving them to push the concept of the GUI. The marketing value of the GUI is effectively gone. Likewise, not only did systems that previously lacked a strong GUI nearly all develop one (or more) but the GUI-based systems that did not have strong command line tools went back and developed those as well and developed new professional ecosystems around them. The tide most certainly turned.

Furthermore, over the past nearly two decades the rhetoric of the non-GUI world has begun to take hold. System administrators working from a position of a mastery of the command line, on any platform, generally outperform their counterparts leading to more career opportunities, more challenging roles and higher incomes. Companies focused on command line administration find themselves with more skilled workers and a higher administration density which, in turn, lowers overall cost.

This alone was enough to make the position of the GUI begin to falter. But there was always the old argument that GUIs, even in the late 1990s, used a small amount of system resources and only added a very small amount of additional attack surface. Even if they were not going to be used, why not have them installed “just in case.” As CPUs got faster, memory got larger, storage got cheaper and as system design improved the impact of the GUI became less and less so this argument of having GUIs available got stronger. Especially strong was the proposal that GUIs allowed junior staff to do tasks as well making them more useful. But it was far too common for senior staff to retain the GUI as a crutch in these circumstances.

With the advent of virtualization in the commodity server space, this all began to change. The cost of a GUI became suddenly noticeable again. A system running twenty virtual machines would suddenly use twenty times the CPU resources and twenty times the memory and twenty times the storage capacity of a single GUI instance. The footprint of the GUI was noticeable again. As virtual machine densities began to climb, so did the relative impact of the GUI.

Virtualization gave rise to cloud computing. Cloud computing increased virtual machine deployment densities and exposed other performance impacts of GUIs, mostly in terms of longer instance build times and more complex remote console access. Systems requiring a GUI began to noticeably lag behind their GUI-less counterparts in adoption and capabilities.

But the far bigger factor was the artifact of cloud computing’s standard billing methodologies. Because cloud computing typically exposes per-instance costs in a raw, fully visible way IT departments had no means of fudging or overlooking the costs of GUI deployments whose additional overhead would often even double the cost of a single cloud instance. Accounting would very clearly see bills for GUI systems costing far more than their GUI-less counterparts. Even non-technical teams could see that the cost of GUIs was adding up even before considering the cost of management.

This cost continues to increase as we move towards container technologies where the scale of individual instances becomes small and smaller means that the relative overhead of the GUI becomes more significant.

But the real impact, possibly the biggest exposure of the issues around GUI driven systems is the industry’s move towards the DevOps system automation models. Today only a relatively small percentage of companies are actively moving to a full cloud-enabled, elastically scalable DevOps model of system management but the trend is there and the model leaves GUI administrators and their systems completely behind. With DevOps models direct access to machines is no longer a standard mode of management and systems have gone even farther than working solely from the command line to being built completely in code meaning that not only do system administrators working in the DevOps world need to interact with their systems at a command line but they must do so programmatically.

The market is rapidly moving towards fewer, more highly skilled systems administrators working with many, many more servers “per admin” than in any previous era. The idea that a single systems administrator can only manage a few dozen servers, a common belief in the GUI world, has long been challenged even in traditional “snowflake” command line systems administration with numbers easily climbing into the few hundred range. But the DevOps model or similar automation models take those numbers into the thousands of servers per administrator. The overhead of GUIs is becoming more and more obvious.

As new technologies like cloud, containers and DevOps automation models become pervasive so does the natural “sprawl” of workloads. This means that companies of all sizes are seeing an increase in the numbers of workloads that need to be managed. Companies that traditionally had just two or three servers today may have ten or twenty virtual instances! The number of companies that need only one or two virtual machines is dwindling.

This all hardly means that GUI administration is going to go away in the near, or even the distant, future. The need for “one off” systems administration will remain. But the ratio of administrators able to work in a GUI administration “one off” mode versus those that need to work through the command line and specifically through scripted or even fully automated systems (a la Puppet, Chef, Ansible) is already tipping incredibly rapidly towards non-GUI system administration and DevOps practices.

What does all of this mean for us in the trenches of the real world? It means that even roles, such as small business Windows administration, that traditionally have had little or no need to work at the command line need to reconsider the dependence on the local server GUI for our work.   Command line tools and processes are becoming increasingly powerful, well known and how we are expected to work. In the UNIX world the command line has always remained and the need to rely on GUI tools would almost always be seen as a major handicap. This same impression is beginning to apply to the Windows world as well. Slowly those that rely on GUI tools exclusively are being seen as second class citizens and increasingly relegated to more junior roles and smaller organizations.

The improvement in scripting and automation tools also means that the value of scale is getting better so that the cost to administer small numbers of servers is becoming very high on a per workload basis which means that there is a very heavy encouragement for smaller companies to look towards management consolidation through the use of outside vendors who are able to specialize in large scale systems management and leverage scripting and automation techniques to bring their costs more in line with larger businesses’ costs. The ability to use outside vendors to establish scale or an approximation to it will be very important, over time, for smaller businesses to remain cost competitive in their IT needs while still getting the same style of computing advantages that larger businesses are beginning to experience today.

It should be noted that happening in tandem with this industry shift towards the command line and automation tools is the move to more modern, powerful and principally remote GUIs. This is a far less dramatic shift but one that should not be overlooked. Tools like Microsoft’s RSAT and Server Administrator provide a GUI view that is leveraging command line and API interfaces under the hood. Likewise Canonical’s Ubuntu world now has Landscape. These tools are less popular in the enterprise but are beginning to make the larger SMB market able to maintain a GUI dependency while also managing a larger set of server instances. The advancement in these types of GUI tools may be the strongest force slowing the adoption of command line tools across the board.

Whether we are interested in the move from the command line, to GUIs and back to the command line as an interesting artifact of the history of Information Technology as an industry or if we are looking at this as a means to understanding how systems administration is evolving as a career path or business approach for our own uses it is good for us to appreciate the factors that caused it to occur and why the ebb and flow of the industry is now taking us back out to the sea of the command line once again. By understanding these forces we can more practically asses where the future will take us, when the tide may again change, how to best approach our own careers or decide on both technology and human talent for our organizations.

Licensing, Linux, Virtualization

Linux Virtualization Deployment Advantage

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As more and more businesses begin to deploy virtualization broadly, we must begin to step back and reconsider the opportunities presented to us by this shift in datacenter architecture.  Virtualization comes with new challenges and potential not only for cost savings but for aggressive project implementation.  Small businesses, especially, when using virtualization tend to prepare themselves for projects that they could never have envisioned doing during the era of physical-only servers.

The big winners in this space of emerging virtualization opportunity are the open source operating systems such as Linux, OpenSolaris and FreeBSD.  The reason that these particular operating systems have unique opportunities that Windows and Mac OSX do not is because of the way that they are, or can be, licensed.  Each of these operating systems has an option by which they are available completely for free – something that cannot be done with Windows or Mac OSX.

Traditionally, when purchasing a new server a business would price out expensive hardware with relatively inexpensive software.  An enterprise operating system, such as Windows, would typically represent a relatively small percentage of the cost of a new server.  Even a small server would cost a few thousand dollars and Windows Server can easily be purchased for less than one thousand dollars.  In this scenario a business looking to purchase a new server would see only a very small cost savings in opting for a “free” operating system since introducing a new OS has its own risks and the bulk of the cost of the new server is in the hardware which would still need to be purchased.

Given that equation, only a rare small business would consider the purchase of a non-Windows-based server.  The opportunity for failure is too high given the risk of change and the cost savings are too small.  Today, though, virtualization is commonplace and becoming more ubiquitous every day.  Businesses virtualizing their infrastructure typically have excess capacity on their servers that is going unused.  As these businesses and their IT departments begin to look to utilize this spare capacity they will increasingly find that the cost of deploying virtualized Windows Server remains high while the cost of deploying a virtualized Linux or OpenSolaris server is nominal – generally nothing more than the effort to do so without any capital expenditure or its associated risk.

The ability to deploy new servers, at any time, without any cost is a significant advantage that companies have not begun to truly comprehend.  If a business wants a new web server, for instance, they can have one provisioned and built in thirty minutes without buying any licenses.  Having redundant virtualization hardware means that a redundant web server can be had as well – again without any capital cost.  Unlike Windows (or other commercial operating systems) there is no need to purchase a second license just to have a backup server.

This means that for the first time many businesses can begin to consider clusters as well.  Typically the cost of licensing software for clustering was prohibitive but if that licensing becomes free then suddenly clusters become very attractive options.

Of course, as open source proponents will point out, the low cost of Linux and other free and open source solutions have long been reasons to move to these platforms, but this discounts the incredible shift in pricing structure that occurs only when spare usable capacity meets the previously existing free licenses.  It is only because so many business have already implemented virtualization strategies, or are in the process of doing so, that this new opportunity truly presents itself.

The first challenge will be in getting businesses to begin to think of operating systems and application platforms as being free.  The ways in which businesses may take advantage of this has yet to be seen.  Businesses are so used to being hamstrung by the need to buy new hardware and expensive server software licenses for every new system deployment that the widespread availability of spare server images is quite novel indeed.

Of course, as with many new technology changes, it is the small and medium business space where the greatest change will likely take place.  Large enterprises are already doing datacenter consolidation and do not necessarily have spare capacity available to them as their capacity plan already takes into account virtualization.  But in the smaller business space where capacity planning is a practically non-existent practice we see a different type of opportunity.

What we typically see in small businesses moving to virtualization is an over-purchasing of hardware.  This generally comes from a misunderstanding of how capacity planning and virtual guest interaction will occur in the virtualized environment but also from a desire to err on the side of overpowered versus underpowered and the nature of virtualization capacity planning being a bit of a “black art”.  Because of this, however, many small businesses have server resources sitting idle.  It is not uncommon to see a powerful server virtualizing just two server instances when there is capacity to virtualize a dozen or more.

It is this overprovisioning of hardware that offers unique opportunity.  Many small businesses, and even medium sized businesses, may manage to effectively virtualize their entire existing server infrastructure leaving no further opportunity for cost savings through consolidation.  At this point the spare capacity of the existing servers offers no further cost savings and can now be viewed as capacity for growth instead.

This begs the question of “What new deployment opportunities exist given these opportunities?”  This question is difficult to answer as it will be different for nearly every business, but we can look at some commonalities to build a rough picture of where we may see new value presenting itself.

The most obvious new opportunity is in new web applications.  Small businesses often would like to take advantage of free web-based applications but do not want to risk deploying new, low-priority applications to their existing Windows-based web server of do not even have a server available to do so.  Creating one or more open source application servers is incredibly simple.  Deploying a wiki, corporate web portal, a blogging engine or news site, bug or incident tracking application, microblogging platform (a la laconi.ca,) CRM, ERP or any of thousands of similar applications can be done quickly and easily with minimal cost using only “spare” time from the existing IT resources.  Any number of internal applications such as these could bring value to the company and produce very little impact on a virtualization platform so many could be deployed utilizing only a small amount of excess capacity.

Beyond obvious web apps there are more feature-rich systems that could be deployed for no cost.  A great example is the OpenFire instant messaging and presence server.  Companies can suddenly roll out complete enterprise class, secure, internal instant messaging applications at no cost whatsoever.  Another example is in monitoring systems such as Nagios, Zenoss or Zabbix – all of which are available for free and represent a real benefit for companies that currently have no such system.  Enterprise monitoring completely for free.

Beyond new applications there is also an “environmental” benefit to be had.  In an enterprise environment changes going into production go through a series of testing.  Typically big businesses will maintain a development server environment, a user acceptance testing environment and then the production environment.  For a small business to do this with Windows is extremely cost prohibitive as the servers in each environment need to be licensed.  But with open source servers being virtualized using spare capacity deploying virtual servers for each of these environments is completely free and allows small businesses to test their own processes before making production changes giving them added stability previously unaffordable to them.

After all of these growth benefits there is one additional benefit to consider – flexibility.  Because these new systems can be deployed and tested with no cost it provides a new opportunity for small shops to deploy open source solutions that may replace expensive Windows solutions that they are currently using.  This could include replacing Exchange with Zimbra or replacing IIS with Apache or Active Directory with an LDAP server.  Doing a project like this would be risky and potentially costly if the hardware and software had to be purchased up front.  But if the project can be done, only using free time from the existing IT department, and can be done as a free “proof of concept” before looking to do a pilot and then full production replacement then risk can be minimized and the entire project can be effectively free.

While a full architectural replacement may be very aggressive for an average small business it is also a very significant potential cost savings.  Moving completely to open source systems is not for everyone and should be evaluated carefully.  The ability to evaluate a project of this magnitude, for free, is very important and small businesses should consider doing so to be sure that they are using the systems that make the most sense for their business model and needs rather than simply using the solutions with which they are already familiar or are already in place.

There are many additional ways in which free and open source products, deployed using existing, excess server capacity, can be used to expand the IT infrastructure of small businesses.  Learning to seek out opportunities rather than seeking cost savings from IT is a new process for most small businesses and requires some relearning, but those that take the time to pursue these opportunities have many benefits to be gained.