Lancaster University has savedover
£100,000 on electricity bills and more than £20,000 on hardware
procurement in less than three years after virtualising large
chunks of its x86 server estate.
The organisation, which is based in north-west England and
educates about 11,000 students, began a four-month pilot of EMC's
VMWare technology in March 2006. Its datacentre was starting to hit
capacity in terms of the amount of power being consumed to run and
cool its IT infrastructure and it was running out of space.
Matthew Storey, systems technical co-ordinator for information
systems services at the University, says: "We started examining
virtualisation to reduce the impact of the physical issues we were
facing, but we also explored other benefits that came along with
that. Although the real focus was on cost savings, there's also an
active desire in the university to be more 'green'. And from a
management perspective, it's far easier to manage a large number of
virtualised servers than lots of machines with different operating
systems."
The decision was taken to consolidate 18 physical servers down
to four, although this number has now risen to 11 Dell blade
servers, running more than 130 virtual machines.
The benefits
The move has meant the University can provide staff and students
with growing numbers of IT services without needing to change or
expand its existing physical location. It has also led to the
consolidation of multiple servers - "hidden away in cupboards and
under people's desks" - back into the datacentre, so they can be
managed more easily and effectively.
The deployment has freed IT staff from time-consuming server
support and hastened the time to deploy new applications. While in
the past, provisioning a new system could take up to a month,
introducing a new virtual machine takes only hours.
"Because we're not spending so much time supporting ageing
hardware and the deployment of virtual machines is much more rapid,
we can do much more with our resources. This enables us to explore
new technology and different approaches and generally provide a
better service with the same resources as before," explains
Storey.
The improved use of resources is partially down to the
introduction of a single pane of glass management console, however.
The software provides an instant ability to see what the server
estate is doing and whether any bottlenecks are arriving. In such
an event action can be taken, making the environment easier to
manage.
But beyond the expected lower bills in utilities and hardware,
the University has also realised savings from ancillary systems
such as UPSs, KVM and network switches. "You still need them with
virtual systems but in reduced numbers, so that contributes to a
general reduction in costs, maintenance requirements, support
contracts and the like," points out Storey.
Virtualisation
limits
But he warns that it is still not advisable or even possible to
virtualise all kinds of applications. Some suppliers, whether large
vendors or niche players, still do not support the technology in
either all or some of their packages. This means that organisations
keen to press ahead regardless have to either take the risk of
providing such support themselves or be prepared to move packages
back onto physical hardware should faults occur in order to show
the manufacturer where problems have occurred.
The University itself has also chosen not to virtualise some
high I/O systems such as web caches because of the related
performance overhead, which includes the amount of network
bandwidth needed. It has likewise been unable to virtualise
packages with specific hardware requirements such as dongles, which
are added for security purposes.
The next step
The next stage from here, meanwhile, involves fine-tuning the
existing implementation. As a result, the IT team is currently
exploring different approaches to improve the efficiency of
undertaking back-ups. "At the moment, we back up each virtual
machine, but it's time-consuming, puts a load on the virtual back
end and there are smarter ways of doing it. Many virtual machines
are 90 per cent identical - the difference lies in the applications
and data - so we're looking at tools that would just back up a
sub-set," Storey says.
The organisation is likewise currently exploring whether to
undertake an application rationalisation exercise, while
undertaking a VMWare-based pilot project to evaluate the benefits
of virtualising its desktop.
Top tips
- Deploy management consoles to save on administration and
support costs
- Consider whether you can take the risk of deploying unsupported
applications
- Continue fine-tuning your implementation by keeping an eye out
for new management tools that can make life easier
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External links
Lancaster University
>>
Department of Finace and Personnel: IT Assist >>
Presentation of IT Assist's virtualisation project >>