The Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) has
completed a six-month virtualisation project to cut overheads and
improve its disaster recovery capability.
By switching 17 core applications to a virtual environment, the
ATL was able to consolidate its physical servers by a ratio of five
to one. Virtualisation makes this possible by allowing multiple
operating systems to run on a single server.
Bernard King, systems architect at the ATL, said the VMware ESX
Server 2.5 virtualisation software viewed applications as a pool of
resources, independent of hardware. Using VMware's VMotion tool,
they can be swapped between servers while running to make the most
efficient use of the available hardware resources.
This ability to swap applications between machines also provides
business continuity in the event of a server failing.
The virtualised applications include Microsoft Exchange Server
2003 with Active Directory, SQL Server 2000, an Oracle 9i 10g
database, Symantec Antivirus Centre and Autonomy's K2 search
application.
However, the ATL has delayed virtualising an essential
Blackberry management server, said King. "You can only have one
licence with [the Blackberry server], and you have to have a
connection to the internet to have it working. We also lack the
internal skill to migrate it," he said.
ATL has also shelved moving a content management system because
of issues with the supplier.
"Licensing is the main stumbling block when virtualising. With
our document management system, the supplier is reluctant to
support it. They were going to put us on a support contract that
would be more costly, so we decided not to virtualise it," said
King.
Related article:
Virtualisation is making IT more cost effective
Link to the Association of Teachers and
Lecturers
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