Description
I am an IT technologist for a large international company. One of the inherent requirements for the industry is to always stay abreast with the changes in evolving technology. I used to have a 14 physical servers in my home network. This network served two purposes: one, it provided a great training environment to keep abreast of new technologies to help maintain required certifications; and two, provided the infrastructure to support my home automation/security and personal weather station interests.
Recently, my company began a major server consolidation effort using virtualization. At the time I did not know much about the technology so I took up the challenge to learn about it in my home environment. I built a very robust machine to host my new Microsoft Server 2008 Hyper-V platform. As my experience grew, I migrated 13 of my physical servers into the new virtual environment (I left my network backup server separate).
If you are not familiar with Home automation or personal weather stations, the devices used to provide data streams rely on numerous serial and USB types of inputs. Combined, the two servers required 6 serial physical inputs and 4 USB physical inputs. Having my new automation and weather station computers now virtualized created a MAJOR problem - I had no way of interfacing the physical ports of the host with the virtual ports on my guest servers.
FabulaTech solutions
I perused and queried the Internet and blogs to find a solution. On several virtualization sites I discovered my problems were not unique. Several posts highly recommended FabulaTech to resolve problems similar to mine.
After reviewing the numerous products presented by FabulaTech, I decided to download trial versions of their "Network Serial Port Kit" and "USB over Network" solutions. I discovered that they satisfied my virtual IP connectivity needs quite well. Installation was a breeze and the GUIs very intuitive. Throughput and program access to the ports are as if they were still physical. I have not experienced any degradation in performance and am quite happy with the FabulaTech products.
Before finding FabulaTech, I was afraid that I would have to return to my earlier automation and weather station physical servers. The FabulaTech solutions allowed me to keep them virtualized and allowed me to more energy efficient by reducing my electricity needs and reducing the heat load of my home office/lab.
Thanks FabulaTech!
Rick A.