This blog entry is starting the journey of converting a small business office in to a virtualized office that will provide the same functionality virtaully as the office has today in the brick and mortar.

Background

A client with a small office has decided to move from their current office that is much too large and with an adversarial land lord. They have 4 employees and the owner is remote and located in God’s Country without high speed Internet. The office generates a huge amound of paper but most of the work is completed on computers and they leverage 3rd party databases over the internet. They have an Windows Domain running active directory on a single (very old) server. All of their databases are in Access. They do own a copy of SQL server but it has never been installed. They currently get access to the Internet and dialtone from CBEYOND. CBEYOND has been a very good provider for all of these services. The office will physically no longer exist. The Plan We will remotely locate all of the users to their own home offices. We will use a VoIP phone service from a company called Ring Central. When we get into to the detail on this there will be another blog post. Ring Central will provide phone service to the homes and their virtual PBX will have autoattendant, call routing, voice mail and the like. We will move the server to a small data center that is willing to take the server in and provide some bandwidth.

Problems

We are planning on connecting the remote PCs to the server using a VPN connection. During initial testing the VPN connection provided suitable access to the file system and to other network services but when the application are access the performance is unaccepatable. This is due to the nature of the application of couse. Remote access to M$ Access over a VPN is never going to be a good thing. During the first test I was able to connect to the VPN server with no problem. When I started the application it took over a minute for the first window of the applciation to open. This is clearly because of the database access that was happening. When the app was then available it could take as long as a minute to move from record to record. Clearly this is not going to work. There is not enough time in the project to attempt to rewrite the software or to even dive into how much data is actually being moved.

Possible Solutions

We are going create a virtual server in the data center that will have 4 Windows XP instances running on it. I have lots of experience using ESX from VMWare but a cluster with new servers and shared storage is not in the cards for this project. This is more like find the fastest desktop we have, pray that it has some memory and CPU and figure out how to use it. There are many virtualization softwares out there. There are some that have been very well baked and others that are still raw. I have found a product from Sun that looks like it will fit the bill. It is Sun’s VirtualBox. I found it to be simple to install and use. I also found that it has the ability to use a remote desktop client to connect, not to the virtual, but rather to the physical host providing a port number and remote control the environment. This is important because it will let you access the virtual machine while booting if need be. Next test will be deploying a copy of XP on a virtual and preparing it for use. I will then sysprep the installation to make it ready for cloning. We are going to install 4 copies of licenses Windows XP that will be configured to only run the database applications. The other office apps will run from the users PCs at their homes.