Support - Done Well
The word 'support' has become cringe-worthy, much like 'Vista' or 'Millennium Edition.' Opinions seem to fall on one side or the other of a distinct dividing line - no vendor's 'support' is merely adequate these days. It's either phenomenal or terrible.
It's crazy to think that vendors strive for an utter lack of excellence. Still, many end users report just such an attitude in their communications with support personnel. Too often, customer support calls are considered unavoidable nuisances in an otherwise productive day. Of course, no one would ever admit they feel that way. But the attitude is pervasive, and it is all too easy for customers to detect, whether in voice inflection during phone calls or while reading hastily prepared e-mail responses. Worse still is getting no response at all.
BlueLock works very diligently to avoid falling into that trap. Working the front lines for a VMware hosting provider is a unique opportunity. Customers can contact us via e-mail or by telephone and all sorts of queries come in which keeps things interesting. Much of our work is generated automatically by our monitoring system. It's important for BlueLock Support personnel to be able to juggle several roles each day and we employ several tools that make it easier to provide top-level service.
Don't Hesitate, Educate!
We understand that Cloud Computing is a fairly new concept, so one of the primary roles that we perform on the support desk is education. It takes time to become familiar with virtual servers, online disk expansions, and balloon drivers. At BlueLock, we can help make such concepts more clear - and it's as easy as calling the Support Desk.
The most popular topic for education at the BlueLock Support Desk is snapshots. Proper use of snapshots can make an administrator's job much easier. In a nutshell, each virtual machine on our environment is comprised of a file - that's right, the entire server is essentially a file running on a host system. Snapshots serve basically as restore points for those files. This is useful mainly when making major configuration changes or installing new software. When a snapshot is created, what really happens is that a 'change file' is generated. All subsequents changes to the virtual server are written to the change file. When testing is complete, the snapshot must be either committed or reverted. Committing the snapshot merges it with the original server file. This happens on the fly with no interruptions to service. Reverting essentially destroys the change file and returns the server to its state before the snapshot was taken.
The primary drawback of snapshots is that they tend to grow very quickly. Thus, BlueLock has a retention policy of 24-48 hours during which the snapshot must be committed or reverted.
VMware virtual servers are unique entities, especially when backing them up. Backups at BlueLock work much differently than with standard, physical hardware. We perform a combination of snapshots, disk-to-disk and tape backups to protect customer data. The current system is complex enough for its own blog posting, so I'll cover that in more detail at a later date.
