One server at a time

It's a virtual world out there, and as cost-cutting continues, it's not likely to change any time soon. The move to virtual infrastructures is continuing at a pace. In this feature, ITWeb takes a look at life at the virtualisation coalface. So far, say its fans, so good.

Local service provider RSAWeb went virtual about two years ago. Says MD Rob Gilmour: “About 50% of our infrastructure is virtualised now and our roadmap is set out to take it to 90% in the next year and a half.

“We are seeing real gains. Power consumption and cooling requirements have decreased by 50%, and we've seen a space saving of 70%, coupled with the fact that computing power is increasing. Virtualisation is great in terms of requiring less hardware, but obviously you get better benefits if you have a big piece of hardware underneath. Our big problem is data centre space. There is no power infrastructure available, so to build a new one is a problem. We have been able to almost double the utilisation of our centre in Cape Town due to virtualisation.”

Gilmour says the company plans to run its entire shared hosting platform on virtual infrastructure. “Uptime is a benefit. We used to have one or two servers go down every month, whereas now it is pretty stable. With the technology maturing we're seeing lots of gains in the high availability space. We can now put certain SLAs and services on servers because we know if a piece of hardware fails, it's not the end of the world.”

The end of the world is where you may have to go to find skills, however. “There are a lot of courses and certifications that you can do online but not a lot of experience [out there]. We had to upskill all of our existing staff. No one who came for interviews had any experience.”

The pace of change is another issue. “We bought five Zen server licences and then they released the same features for free a few months later,” Gilmour says. “It does make you ask if you should re-evaluate your roadmap and wait a little longer. What does seem to be maturing is the entry-level feature set - it now covers 60% to 70% of requirements. The lines are becoming clear on what is a paid-for feature and what is free or inexpensive.”

Going forward, hardware is on Gilmour's mind. “Storage requirements are changing the way we look at hardware. Storage is vital to virtualisation as it all runs on a shared platform. Storage is expensive - to maintain and implement. People don't necessarily realise that. You can't get away with using cheap storage, as we thought. You really have to throw money at it as everything depends on it.”

Nissan SA has gone the virtualisation route as part of its cost-cutting initiatives. The motor industry, globally, has been pretty hard hit, and IT departments are feeling the pinch.

“One of the things we looked at was licences (and how to reduce the number), and hardware, particularly maintenance,” says Nissan SA senior IT manager Francois Greeff. “Yes, we buy hardware with warranties but some of the big IBMs only have one-year warranties and then they become horrifically expensive [to maintain]. We went to every one of our 100+ servers and investigated what is running on it, what problems it has, etcetera.”

That, says Greeff, was phase one, which was completed in November last year. Phase two involved consolidating servers and virtualising them. “We tried to do full-blown virtualisation as much as possible,” he says. “We now have 25 servers with some 60 OS licences. The most important thing is to find out what influences what,” he adds. “Things like Word and Excel, for example, run together, and you can't run two things that need the same resources [on the same machine]. So you need to make different virtual machines.”

You can't get away with using cheap storage, as we thought. You really have to throw money at it.

Rob Gilmour, MD, RSAWeb

Nissan also had to migrate its Adabas Natural warranty systems off its mainframe, as well as accommodate its SQL servers. “SQL doesn't like virtualisation,” he notes. “It has to have its own hardware.”

The company's major challenge came from timing, not technology, however, as it was unsure of how much budget it had and, as such, what it could do when. “We're now looking at the last few applications we can kill,” Greeff states. “We're analysing it from a business needs point of view - why does the business need it? Is there another way of doing it? The business needs to make the call, the user optimisation days are over.”

Virtual medical administration service provider Vmed has virtualised some of its desktop fleet using VMware View, including VMware VDI. According to consumer experience head Christo Groenewald, the business required faster desktop services, and needed to be able to deploy desktops rapidly and efficiently.

"Through VMware View, we were able to create a flexible virtual desktop infrastructure that allows for rapid deployment and transfer of priorities and workloads within a fast-growing organisation," he says. The company has virtualised 250 desktops, running on six physical servers to date.

Vmed is part of the Liberty Health group, and is growing fast. “We're rolling out our current offering into Africa,” says Groenewald, “going into 16 countries in the next 18 months.” The company is considering rolling out VMware View to all of those territories in a bid to manage maintenance and support as effectively as possible.

“The only problem now is connectivity,” he notes. That said: “We've made a business decision to invest in communications infrastructure into Africa so we can leverage the value-adds and spin-offs,” he adds.

SAB Limited has centralised its Exchange environment and consolidated its servers in each of the 115 regional offices (including breweries and bottling plants) across South Africa. Technical manager Jan Bosch says the company had an Exchange server plus up to four application servers in each office, and has now centralised Exchange and consolidated the servers so that each office has two servers plus a storage device. “We've reduced our server count by 60 just through the Exchange consolidation. We also moved from 32-bit to 64-bit hardware while we were doing this.”

Some of the big IBMs only have one-year warranties; then they become horrifically expensive.

Francois Greeff, senior IT manager, Nissan SA

Bosch says the company has standardised its hardware footprint in all of the regions and thus reduced the complexity in rolling out, maintaining and supporting this infrastructure.

“This not only gave us a hardware saving but gave us an operating system cost saving because we don't have to pay for the first four operating system licences anymore. It's also given us redundancy - if one server falls over, the workload goes to the other. It was a cost saving and reliability and redundancy and flexibility issue for us,” he adds.

All of the above has been completed in the last year and a half, and the department has since virtualised its Interoperability Lab, as well as its development and quality assurance environments. “If someone wants to play, we can just pull a server up,” Bosch says, “and then kill it when they are done. It gives us flexibility.”

Next up is SAB's data centre. So far the company has held workshops with Microsoft to look at what servers can and can't be virtualised and how many servers the company will need. “That's the hard part,” he says. “Planning, getting the hardware, getting the budget allocated. Virtualising a server is easy - it is a tool you run. Planning is critical as you cannot just haphazardly do it.”

SAB has implemented System Centre Virtual Machine manager to manage its virtual servers, and Systems Centre Configuration Manager to manage the environment. Everything is run centrally from its offices in Johannesburg.

With cloud computing making headlines, and cost-cutting firmly entrenched in corporate minds, virtualisation is going to be the option for IT departments for some time to come. It does have its shortcomings, however, as described above, and it is definitely not the answer to everything.