Often as I talk to clients the subject of virtualizing their Agile PLM environment comes up and as much as they may want to embrace the technology it seems as though they are usually afraid to make a commitment, even in a staging/test environment. Here at Zero Wait-State, we have been running on VMware for years.

Our first use of VMware was with their workstation product. Workstation is a great tool to produce a virtual machine and host it as an application on top of another operating system. For most of our developers and implementation staff, we could quickly create a virtual machine (VM) that represented our customer’s environment and run it locally on our Windows XP based laptops. When it came time to test, we could open up VMware Workstation and start the client’s VM. This was great until resource requirements for various product lines became more demanding.

Over time we needed to run Eclipse for Java development, possibly a CAD tool, a VM for Agile and a VM for our DesignState server and it simply overwhelmed our laptops and workstations because we had the underlying operating system as well. We turned to VMware ESX and ESXi.

These are great products that we were immediately drawn to. Staff started offloading their VM needs to the server and productivity improved greatly through freed local resources. Soon we were able to consolidate another physical machine. This opened the door to vSphere and central management with vCenter. This is awesome stuff and we will review its capabilties in this post.

Hopefully, sharing how we use this technology on a daily basis will help those who are hesitant to realize the power of virtualization take a step of faith and test the waters. My goal here is to do more than just talk about it; I am going to show you what we do. I have the need to stand up an Agile PLM 9.3.0.2 environment for testing purposes. As you know, the Agile EC, Agile API (development) and PLM stuff we do :). Therefore, this is going to be more of a series with full screencasts. Here is how I see the series taking shape:

1. Create a Windows 2008 SP1 virtual machine template. (Why SP1? Because that is what is supported by the latest release of Agile right now.)
2. Provision a virtual machine from the template we just created and get it ready for installation of Agile PLM.
3. Install AgilePLM (multiple screen casts). This is not an Agile tutorial but rather a focus on virtualization and how it can save your bacon on the installation process when things go wrong.
4. Disaster Recovery. Wow … DR what’s that? The ability to RESTORE … more meaningful than just a backup.
5. I may cover importing, exporting and other tasks but suspect time will limit my ability to knock these out. I have a long list of blogs I keep meaning to write.

As you can see there are a few things to chat about and in my opinion, all worthwhile. So here we go: Part 1 Creating a Windows SP1 VM template, enjoy! (Opens a new window)

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