In the last 6 months, I have helped multiple customers achieve their dream of a virtual machine environment built for them exclusively, but with abilities to control their virtual machine setup, configuration, turn up, tear down, etc.  These dedicated infrastructure environments are in the ipHouse data center.

This isn’t ‘cloud computing’ as many people think of it (thanks to Amazon EC2 and the like), but it is pretty close to that vague definition, and with far more control available in terms of everything-vm-wise.

What do I mean?  With this virtual private cloud, a customer can set up 3 Ubuntu systems, 2 Windows Server 2003, 1 FreeBSD, and 7 Windows Server 2008 systems.  There really isn’t anything novel about this (again, reference Amazon EC2 and the like).

What is novel is that the customer can configure these VMs as they wish.  Disk space allocation, partitioning, memory configurations, number of vCPUs.  Basically, if you can do it on a physical server – you can do it virtually.

Another differentiating feature is that VMware vSphere 4 supports many operating systems while most public cloud providers offer a very limited number in comparison.  This choice alone can be enough to warrant looking at this kind of solution.

No per hour fees, no storage fees (above what the customer has purchased), highly available (if configured to do so), dynamic resource scheduling (if configured to do so), bandwidth fees that are predictable. (see VMare vMotion and Storage vMotion, VMware HA, VMware DRS via website)

I’ll build a configuration example offering shared storage between the VMware physical servers.  I’ll be doing some cost estimates for the per month fees.  These estimates will be high and are purely shown for example.  You would want to contact ipHouse Sales to get a real idea for the costs involved.

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