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By George Rose, IT ManagerInformation Systems

 

Some really exciting stuff is going on in the IT Department this past month.

In an attempt to lower our IT costs we have been looking into virtualization of our servers.
What we are referring to is called server virtualization, which means, partitioning one physical server into several virtual servers, or machines. Each virtual machine can interact independently with other devices, applications, data and users as though it were a separate physical resource.
Different virtual machines can run different operating systems and multiple applications while sharing the resources of a single physical computer. And, because each virtual machine is isolated from other virtualized machines, if one crashes, it doesn’t affect the others.
We are currently putting this idea to the test. We have built a virtual server and installed a Linux web server and three copies of Windows 2003 Server, all on one machine.

There are many advantages to using virtualization, the most obvious being the cost savings due to a reduced number of physical servers. The plan is to build two virtual servers and run three virtual machines on each. This will reduce the number of servers we require by four.
Another advantage is in the area of disaster recovery. As some of you may be aware, Windows does not take kindly to being moved to different hardware.  In an attempt to minimize downtime, in the event of a server failure, we currently have a spare server with a varied selection of hardware on hand. The idea was that we could build a backup server that could be configured to take over for any of our production servers. In testing however, we have found that the process of moving a windows server installation to anything other than an identical machine can be very time consuming.
In a virtual environment however, Windows is not aware of the physical hardware it is running on, it uses the virtual hardware created by the virtual server software. All you require is a spare virtual server and all the virtual machines running on the downed server can be restored with almost no reconfiguration. We are currently testing this scenario for all servers.
Another bonus is heat reduction in server rooms and power savings. Reducing eight servers to four will realize a cost savings of 50%.

I told you it was exciting.