Tag Archives: virtualization

Best Practices, Virtualization

You Can’t Virtualize That!

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We get this all of the time in IT, a vendor tells us that a system cannot be virtualized.  The reasons are numerous.  On the IT side, we are always shocked that a vendor would make such an outrageous claim; and often we are just as shocked that a customer (or manager) believes them.  Vendors have worked hard to perfect this sales pitch over the years and I think that it is important to dissect it.

The root cause of problems is that vendors are almost always seeking ways to lower costs to themselves while increasing profits from customers.  This drives a lot of what would otherwise be seen as odd behaviour.

One thing that many, many vendors attempt to do is limit the scenarios under which their product will be supported.  By doing this, they set themselves up to be prepared to simply not provide support – support is expensive and unreliable.  This is a common strategy.  It some cases, this is so aggressive that any acceptable, production deployment scenario fails to even exist.

A very common means of doing this is to fail to support any supported operating system, de facto deprecating the vendor’s own software (for example, today this would mean only supporting Windows XP and earlier.)  Another example is only supporting products that are not licensed for the use case (an example would be requiring the use of a product like Windows 10 be used as a server.)  And one of the most common cases is forbidding virtualization.

These scenarios put customers into difficult positions because on one hand they have industry best practices, standard deployment guidelines, in house tooling and policies to adhere to; and on the other hand they have vendors often forbidding proper system design, planning and management.  These needs are at odds with one another.

Of course, no one expects every vendor to support every potential scenario.   Limits must be applied.  But there is a giant chasm between supporting reasonable, well deployed systems and actively requiring unacceptably bad deployments.  We hope that our vendors will behave as business partners and share a common interest in our success or, at the very least, the success of their product and not directly seek to undermine both of these causes.  We would hope that, at a very minimum, best effort support would be provided for any reasonable deployment scenario and that guaranteed support would be likely offered for properly engineered, best practice scenarios.

Imagine a world where driving the speed limit and wearing a seatbelt would violate your car warranty and that you would only get support if you drove recklessly and unprotected!

Some important things need to be understood about virtualization.  The first is that virtualization is a long standing industry best practice and is expected to be used in any production deployment scenario for services.  Virtualization is in no way new, even in the small business market it has been in the best practice category for well over a decade now and for many decades in the enterprise space.  We are long past the point where running systems non-virtualized is considered acceptable, and that includes legacy deployments that have been in place for a long time.

There are, of course, always rare exceptions to nearly any rule.  Some systems need access to very special case hardware and virtualization may not be possible, although with modern hardware passthrough this is almost unheard of today.  And some super low latency systems cannot be virtualized but these are normally limited to only the biggest international investment banks and most aggressive hedgefunds and even the majority of those traditional use cases have been eliminated by improvements in virtualization making even those situations rare.  But the bottom line is, if you can’t virtualize you should be sad that you cannot, and you will know clearly why it is impossible in your situation.  In all other cases, your server needs to be virtual.

Is it not important?

If a vendor does not allow you to follow standard best practices for healthy deployments, what does this say about the vendor’s opinion of their own product?  If we were talking about any other deployment, we would immediately question why we were deploying a system so poorly if we plan to depend on it.  If our vendor forces us to behave this way, we should react in the same manner – if the vendor doesn’t take the product to the same degree that we take the least of our IT services, why should we?

This is an “impedance mismatch”, as we say in engineering circles, between our needs (production systems) and how the vendor making that system appears to treat them (hobby or entertainment systems.)  If we need to depend on this product for our businesses, we need a vendor that is on board and understands business needs – has a production mind set.  If the product is not business targeted or business ready, we need to be aware of that.  We need to question why we feel we should be using a service in production, on which we depend and require support, that is not intended to be used in that manner.

Is it supported?  Is it being tested?

Something that is often overlooked from the perspective of customers is whether or not the necessary support resources for a product are in place.  It’s not uncommon for the team that supports a product to become lean, or even disappear, but the company to keep selling the product in the hopes of milking it for as much as they can and bank on either muddling through a problem or just returning customer funds should the vendor be caught in a situation where they are simply unable to support it.

Most software contracts state that the maximum damage that can be extracted from the vendor is the cost of the product, or the amount spent to purchase it.  In a case such as this, the vendor has no risk from offering a product that they cannot support – even if charging a premium for support.  If the customer manages to use the product, great they get paid. If the customer cannot and the vendor cannot support it, they only lose money that they would never have gotten otherwise.  The customer takes on all the risk, not the vendor.

This suggests, of course, that there is little or no continuing testing of the product as well, and this should be of additional concern.  Just because the product runs does not mean that it will continue to run.  Getting up and running with an unsupported, or worse unsupportable, product means that you are depending more and more over time on a product with a likely decreasing level of potential support, slowly getting worse over time even as the need for support and the dependency on the software would be expected to increase.

If a proprietary product is deployed in production, and the decision is made to forgo best practice deployments in order to accommodate support demands, how can this fit in a decision matrix? Should this imply that proper support does not exist? Again, as before, this implies a mismatch in our needs.

 

Is It Still Being Developed?

If the deployment needs of the software follow old, out of date practices, or require out of date (or not reasonably current software or design) then we have to question the likelihood that the product is currently being developed.  In some cases we can determine this by watching the software release cycle for some time, but not in all cases.  There is a reasonable fear that the product may be dead, with no remaining development team working on it.  The code may simply be old, technical debt that is being sold in the hopes of making a last, few dollars off of an old code base that has been abandoned.  This process is actually far more common than is often believed.

Smaller software shops often manage to develop an initial software package, get it on the market and available for sale, but fail to be able to afford to retain or restaff their development team after initial release(s).  This is, in fact, a very common scenario.  This leaves customers with a product that is expected to become less and less viable over time with deployment scenarios becoming increasingly risky and data increasing hard to extricate.

 

How Can It Be Supported If the Platform Is Not Supported?

A common paradox of some more extreme situations is software that, in order to qualify as “supported”, requires other software that is either out of support or was never supported for the intended use case.  Common examples of this are requiring that a server system be run on top of a desktop operating system or requiring versions of operating systems, databases or other components, that are no longer supported at all.  This last scenario is scarily common.  In a situation like this, one has to ask if there can ever be a deployment, then, where the software can be considered to be “supported”?  If part of the stack is always out of support, then the whole stack is unsupported.  There would always be a reason that support could be denied no matter what.   The very reason that we would therefore demand that we avoid best practices would equally rule out choosing the software itself in the first place.

Are Industry Skills and Knowledge Lacking?

Perhaps the issue that we face with software support problems of this nature are that the team(s) creating the software simply do not know how good software is made and/or how good systems are deployed.  This is among the most reasonable and valid reasons for what would drive us to this situation.  But, like the other hypothesis reasons, it leaves us concerned about the quality of the software and the possibility that support is truly available.  If we can’t trust the vendor to properly handle the most visible parts of the system, why would we turn to them as our experts for the parts that we cannot verify?

The Big Problem

The big, overarching problem with software that has questionable deployment and maintenance practice demands in exchange for unlocking otherwise withheld support is not, as we typically assume a question of overall software quality, but one of viable support and development practices.  That these issues suggest a significant concern for long term support should make us strongly question why we are choosing these packages in the first place while expecting strong support from them when, from the onset, we have very visible and very serious concerns.

There are, of course, cases where no other software products exist to fill a need or none of any more reasonable viability.  This situation should be extremely rare and if such a situation exists should be seen as a major market opportunity for a vendor looking to enter that particular space.

From a business perspective, it is imperative that the technical infrastructure best practices not be completely ignored in exchange for blind or nearly blind following of vendor requirements that, in any other instance, would be considered reckless or unprofessional. Why do we so often neglect to require excellence from core products on which our businesses depend in this way?  It puts our businesses at risk, not just from the action itself, but vastly moreso from the risks that are implied by the existence of such a requirement.

Architecture, Best Practices, Virtualization

Virtualization as a Standard Pattern

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Virtualization as an enterprise concept is almost as old as business computing is itself.  The value of abstracting computing from the bare hardware was recognized very early on and almost as soon as computers had the power to manage the abstraction process, work began in implementing virtualization much as we know it today.

The earliest commonly accepted work on virtualization began in 1964 with the IBM CP-40 operating system developers for the IBM System/360 mainframe.  This was the first real foray into commercial virtualization and the code and design from this early virtualization platform has descended today into the IBM VM platform that has been used continuously since 1972 as a virtualization layer for the IBM mainframe families over the decades.  Since IBM first introduced virtualization we have seen enterprise systems adopting this pattern of hardware abstraction almost universally.  Many large scale computing systems, minicomputers and mainframes, moved to virtualization during the 1970s with the bulk of all remaining enterprise systems doing so, as the power and technology were available to them, during the 1980s and 1990s.

The only notable holdout to virtualization for enterprise computing was the Intel IA32 (aka x86) platform which lacked the advanced hardware resources necessary to implement effective virtualization until the advent of the extended AMD64 64-bit platform and even then only with specific new technology.  Once this was introduced the same high performance, highly secure virtualization was available across the board on all major platforms for business computing.

Because low cost x86 platforms lacked meaningful virtualization (outside of generally low performance software virtualization and niche high performance paravirtualization platforms) until the mid-2000s this left virtualization almost completely off of the table for the vast majority of small and medium businesses.  This has lead many dedicated to the SMB space to be unaware that virtualization is a well established, mature technology set that long ago established itself as the de facto pattern for business server computing.  The use of hardware abstraction is nearly ubiquitous in enterprise computing with many of the largest, most stable platforms having no option, at least no officially support option, for running systems “bare metal.”

There are specific niches where the need to avoid hardware abstraction through virtualization is not advised but these are extremely rare, especially in the SMB market.  Typical systems needing to not be virtualized include latency sensitive systems (such as low latency trading platforms) and multi-server combined workloads such as HPC compute clusters where the primary goal is performance above stability and utility.  Neither of these are common to the SMB.

Virtualization offers many advantages.  Often, in the SMB where virtualization is less expected, it is assumed that virtualization’s goal is consolidation where massive scale cost savings can occur or in providing new ways to provide for high availability.  Both of these are great options that can help specific organizations and situations but neither is the underlying justification for virtualization.  We can consolidate and achieve HA through other means, if necessary.  Virtualization simply provides us with a great array of options in those specific areas.

Many of the uses of virtualization are artifacts of the ecosystem such as a potential reduction in licensing costs.  These types of advantages are not intrinsic advantages to virtualization but do exist and cannot be overlooked in a real world evaluation.  Not all benefits apply to all hypervisors or virtualization platforms but nearly all apply across the board.  Hardware abstraction is a concept, not an implementation, so how it is leveraged will vary.  Conceptually, abstracting away hardware whether at the storage layer, at the computing layer, etc. is very important as it eases management, improves reliability and speeds development.

Here are some of the benefits from virtualization.  It is important to note that outside of specific things such as consolidation and high availability nearly all of these benefits apply not only to virtualizing on a single hardware node but for a single workload on that node.

  1. Reduced human effort and impact associated with hardware changes, breaks, modifications, expansion, etc.
  2. Storage encapsulation for simplified backup / restore process, even with disparate hardware targets
  3. Snapshotting of entire system for change management protection
  4. Ease of archiving upon retirement or decommission
  5. Better monitoring capabilities, adding out of band management even on hardware platforms that don’t offer this natively
  6. Hardware agnosticism provides for no vendor lock-in as the operating systems believe the hypervisor is the hardware rather than the hardware itself
  7. Easy workload segmentation
  8. Easy consolidation while maintaining workload segmentation
  9. Greatly improved resource utilization
  10. Hardware abstraction creates a significantly realized opportunity for improved system performance and stability while lowering the demands on the operating system and driver writers for client operating systems
  11. Simplified deployment of new and varied workloads
  12. Simple transition from single platform to multi-platform hosting environments which then allow for the addition of options such as cloud deployments or high availability platform systems
  13. Redeployment of workloads to allow for easy physical scaling

In today’s computing environments, server-side workloads should be universally virtualized for these reasons.  The benefits of virtualization are extreme while the downsides are few and trivial.  The two common scenarios where virtualization still needs to be avoided are in situations where there is specialty hardware that must be used directly on the server (this has become very rare today, but does still exist from time to time) and extremely low latency systems where sub-millisecond latencies are critical.  The second of these is common only in extremely niche business situations such as low latency investment trading systems.  Systems with these requirements will also have incredible networking and geolocational requirements such as low-latency Infiniband with fiber to the trading floor of less than five miles.

Some people will point out that high performance computing clusters do not use virtualization, but this is a grey area as any form of clustering is, in fact, a form of virtualization.  It is simply that this is a “super-system” level of virtualization instead of being strictly at the system level.

It is safe to assume that any scenario in which you might find yourself in which you should not use virtualization you will know it beyond a shadow of a doubt and will be able to empirically demonstrate why virtualization is either physically or practically impossible.  For all other cases, virtualize.  Virtualize if you have only one physical server and one physically workload and just one user.  Virtualize if you are a Fortune 100 with the most demanding workloads.  And virtualize if you are anyone in between.  Size is not a factor in virtualization; we virtualize out of a desire to have a more effective and stable computing environment both today and into the future.

 

Business of IT, IT Management

Just Because You Can…

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I see this concept appear in discussions surrounding virtualization all of the time.  This is a broader, more general concept but virtualization is the “hot, new technology” facing many IT organizations and seems to be the space where currently we see the “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should” problems rearing their ugly heads most prevalently.  As with everything in IT, it is critical that all technical decisions be put into a business context so that we understand why we choose to do what we do and not blindly attempt to make our decisions based on popular deployment methodologies or worse, myths..

Virtualization itself, I should point out, I feel should be a default decision today for those working in the x64 computing space with systems being deployed sans virtualization only when a clear and obvious necessity exists such as specific hardware needs, latency sensitive applications, etc.  Baring any specific need, virtualization is free to implement from many vendors and offers many benefits both today and in future-proofing the environment.

That being said, what I often see today is companies deploying virtualization not as a best practice but as a panacea to all perceived IT problems.  This it certainly is not.  Virtualization is a very important tool to have in the IT toolbox and one that we will reach for very often, but it does not solve every problem and should be treated like every other tool that we posses and used only when appropriate.

I see several things recurring when virtualization discussions come up as a topic.  Many companies today are moving towards virtualization not because they have identified a business need but because it is the currently trending topic and people feel that if they do not implement virtualization that somehow they will be left behind or miss out on some mythical functionality.  This is generally good as it is increasing virtualization adoption, but it is bad because good IT and business decision making processes are being bypassed.  What happens is often that in the wave of virtualization hype IT departments feel that not only do they have to implement virtualization itself but do so in ways that may not be appropriate for their business.

There are four things that I often see tied to virtualization, often accepted as virtualization requirements, whether or not they make sense in a given business environment.  These are server consolidation, blade servers, SAN storage and high availability or live failover.

Consolidation is so often vaunted as the benefit of virtualization that I think most IT departments forget that there are other important reasons for doing implementing it.  Clearly consolidation is a great benefit for nearly all deployments (mileage may vary, of course) and is nearly always able to be achieved simply through better utilization of existing resources.  It is a pretty rare company that runs more than a single physical server that cannot shave some amount of cost through limited consolidation and it is not uncommon to see datacenter footprints decimated in larger organizations.

In extreme cases, though, it is not necessary to abandon virtualization projects just because consolidation proves to be out of the question.  These cases exist for companies with high utilization systems and little budget for a preemptive consolidation investment.  But these shops can still virtualize “in place” systems on a one to one basis to gain other benefits of virtualization today and look to consolidate when hardware needs to be replaced tomorrow or when larger, more powerful servers become more cost effective in the future.  It is important to not rule out virtualization just because its most heralded benefit may not apply at the current time in your environment.

Blade servers are often seen as the choice for virtualization environments.  Blades may play better in a standard virtualization environment than they do with more traditional computational workloads but this is both highly disputable and not necessarily applicable data.  Being a good scenario for blades themselves does not make it a good scenario for a business.  Just because the blades perform better than normal when used in this way does not imply that they perform better than traditional servers – only that they have potentially closed the gap.

Blades needs to be evaluated using the same harsh criteria when virtualizing as when not and, very often, they will continue to fail to provide the long term business value needed to choose them over the more flexible alternatives.  Blades remain far from a necessity for virtualization and often, in my opinion, a very poor choice indeed.

One of the most common misconceptions is that by moving to virtualization one must also move to shared storage such as SAN.  This mindset is the obvious reaction to the desire to also achieve other benefits from virtualization which, if they don’t require SAN, benefit greatly from it.  The ability to load balance or failover between systems is heavily facilitated by having a shared storage backend.  It is a myth that this is a hard requirement, but replicated local storage brings its own complexities and limitations.

But shared storage is far from a necessity of virtualization itself and, like everything, needs to be evaluated on its own.  If virtualization makes sense for your environment but you need no features that require SAN, then virtualize without shared storage.  There are many cases where local storage backed virtualization is an ideal deployment scenario.  There is no need to dismiss this approach without first giving it serious consideration.

The last major assumed necessary feature of virtualization is system level high availability or instant failover for your operating system.  Without a doubt, high availability at the system layer is a phenomenal benefit that virtualization brings us.  However, few companies needed high availability at this level prior to implementing virtualization and the price tag of the necessary infrastructure and software to do it with virtualization is often so high as to make it too expensive to justify.

High availability systems are complex and often overkill.  It is a very rare business system that requires transparent failover for even the most critical systems and those companies with that requirement would almost certainly already have failover processes in place.  I see companies moving towards high availability all of the time when looking at virtualization simply because a vendor saw an opportunity to dramatically oversell the original requirements.  The cost of high availability is seldom justified by the potential loss of revenue from the associated reduction in downtime.  With non-highly available virtualization, downtime for a failed hardware device might be measured in minutes if backups are handled well.  This means that high availability has to justify its cost in potentially eliminating just a few minutes of unplanned downtime per year minus any additional risks assumed by the added system complexity.  Even in the biggest organizations this is seldom justified on any large scale and in a more moderately sized company it is uncommon altogether.  But today we find many small businesses implementing high availability systems at extreme cost on systems that could easily suffer multi-day outages with minimal financial loss simply because the marketing literature promoted the concept.

Like anything, virtualization and all of the associated possibilities that it brings to the table need to be evaluated individually in the context of the organization considering them.  If the individual feature does not make sense for your business do not assume that you have to purchase or implement that feature.  Many organizations virtualize but use only a few, if any, of these “assumed” features.  Don’t look at virtualization as a black box, look at the parts and consider them like you would consider any other technology project.

What often happens in a snowball effect where one feature, likely high availability, is assumed to be necessary without the proper business assessment being performed.  Then a shared storage system, often assumed to be required for high availability, is added as another assumed cost.  Even if high availability features are not purchased the decision to use SAN might already be made and fail to be revisited after changes to the plan are made.  It is very common, in my experience, to find projects of this nature with sometimes more than fifty percent of the total expenditure on the project being spent on products that the purchaser is unable to even describe the reason for having purchased.

This concept does not stop at virtualization.  Extend it to everything that you do.  Keep IT in perspective of the business and don’t assume that going with one technology automatically assumes that you must adopt other technologies that are popularly associated with it.

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.