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When doing Identity Management integrations its very important to properly train consultants/integrators. While shadowing is a good way to get someone aquainted, its even more important to provide hands on training. Dedicating an entire machine for each employees testing purposes becomes difficult quickly.

Virtualization helps eliminate the resource intensive requirements of having all that hardware. Plus it allows you to deal with multiple environments and makes reusing an entire insallation as easy as copy and paste.

In an earlier post I had mentioned that you can setup a VMWare test server using VMWare on Linux as a Development Sever for multiple users.

I followed this link to recently install VMWare 1.0.7 on OpenSUSE 11. Before doing anything update your linux installation from Yast or run the following command in terminal: apt-get update . Run all updates (and do this frequently). Then grab the latest version of VMWare Server from Vmware.com. After unzipping the file these are the commands you should run in terminal and these are the results you should get. The trick is getting your dependencies right. If you get an error along the way just search for that library in yast, or do a google search on the library that is missing and find out how to install it from the terminal. After installing the libraries start the process again. I had to install the latest version of gcc to make this work.

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I wonder how virtualization will tie into Identity Management in the future? I believe Ash once said these virtual components and appliances may take on identities of their own.

At work, I was asked to setup a VMWare Server for testing. We decided to test out VMWare’s Hypervisor Esxi Server which we heard was now FREE.

So what’s a hypervisor? Think of it as an operating system which does nothing but run virtual machines. It directly utilizes the hardware resources of your server and does not run on top of an operating system. So the idea is to maximize performance of your VMs, and possibly being able to run more VMs on a server than before simultaneously.

Microsoft has their own hypervisor. I recently received an email about an event they are doing to push their virtualization products. VMWare is of course a major player and there are others as well.

So we were interested in VMWare’s hypervisor but our major concern was connectivity, both onsite and offsite.

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