I'm currently a system admin for Wayne State Med School in Detroit. I have been chatting with my buddy's from Sweden and Belgium while playing BF4 and they are moving into Data Center Virtualization Technology. They say it is huge over there. I have been self studying Networking a bit and now enrolled in a college Networking course, but have been recently thinking about moving towards Data Center Virtualization. Along with my one Networking class, I'm now reading up on/studying Virtualization technology with info and videos provided from work. Could you guys, Logan, Wendell and Qain (since you are into Networking) do a segment on Virtualization, data center jobs, pay and would it be worth it to peruse it in the US? Or is there much of a demand oversees? Looking at the big picture, it seems like Virtualization either already has or will take off here soon when looking at the security, consolidation, downtime, and cost cutting. Seeing the Network admins (my career goal) at my work seem really stressed out and pissed off all the time... Virtualization and working in a data center seems like a less stressful route.
You'll find a lot of things on virtualization on the forum already, and there was already a video made on virtualization with proxmox I believe.
In Europe, virtualization is pretty big, that is true, most younger computer enthusiasts prefer using linux because of the added freedom and possibilities, and because it's used in schools and universities, but they also want to have a Windows appliance for games and things that require netflix, but they don't want Windows to access the internet freely. The whole thing started about 4 years ago, and now it's done on a massive scale. One of the big advantages is the ability to snapshot appliances and make them portable. A competitive gamer for instance can literally take his Windows appliance on an USB drive and his graphics card to an event, plug in the graphics card if they don't use the same card at the event, load up the appliance, and start to game. At several high stake e-sports events in Europe for instance, each pair of two gamers shared one system that ran two appliances, one for each gamer. When a system was compromized (hey, that happens with Windows, and it always happens at the worst possible time lol), it literally took less than 1 minute to load a new snapshot, and the gamer was good to go and the event was hardly paused. The hosts were linked for video feed production and for the referees and admins to check if everything was going as it was supposed to go. Advantage for the gamers: a ping that never went above 15-20 ms despite all the things going on, and really stable performance, and the absolute certainty that every player had exactly the same system with exactly the same configuration and exactly the same system resources. Advantage for the production: the event didn't have to be halted or paused, and even if a system went down completely because of hardware failure, there was no discontinuity for the e-sports athletes.
There is a basic how to for PCI passthrough (2 GPU's) in a Windows kvm container on linux on the forum, must be about a year or more ago now. Expect difficulties though depending on your hardware, even with PCI passthrough which is pretty straight forward. You'll have to do some research for tweaks depending on your hardware. VGA passthrough (single GPU) is for really advanced linux users only, it's a bitch to set up, and takes a lot of time, and it only works with certain adapters.
Nope that is streaming. (Where a video output or file is compressed, send to the target, decompressed and played)
Virtualization is where you essentially set up a machine within another machine. With the virtual one acting (nearly) as if it were running directly on the hardware itself.
looks like alot of hard work. Why don't they just verify the machines and run steam? As an organizer I would never trust a tournament where people are loading their VMs. How we know if it's not loaded with hacks and micros. Just have clean OS and force them to use their own steam profiles and no usb/software optimizations, cracks, hacks etc... Why you think there's in-box observers in CoD & Dota 2 tournaments?
Virtualization is taking off here in Australia as well. I work on the help desk for a cloud provider myself, specializing in providing Citrix environments for medical companies, practices and doctors. I definitely think it will be the way of the future for large scale business, largely because it's extremely fast disaster recovery traits and heightened security.
If you have any specific questions or need any pointers let me know.
Yes! This is what I was talking about, not so much the gaming side from the comments above. I was hoping Logan, Wendell and Qain could do a segment and break into this more explaining different topics, jobs, pay rates and would it be worth it do change course and head to Virtualization instead of Networking here in the US. I just love getting my tea or beer and just hanging out watching a few show talking about nerdy shit... it's awesome! foreveraloneITman.jpg