Lessons learned while deploying a virtual infrastructure in the datacenter

IT executives have been told often and repeatedly to virtualize their datacenter infrastructure, but for all the years that server virtualization has been around, it is still considered to be a maturing technology. Both large and small companies are now deploying the technology; however, many corporate executives are still waiting to see how far the technology will advance and how much it will cost them before going too far down the path.

Vincent Biddlecombe is the executive vice president and CTO of Transplace, a non-asset-based third-party logistics provider offering manufacturers and retailers logistics technology and transportation management services. His company found that virtualizing the company’s infrastructure provided a number of benefits, from improved efficiencies to increased scalability, and lowered the company’s database licensing costs.

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So what prompted Biddlecombe and his company to go down the virtualization path? And what lessons, if any, did he and his company learn along the way? That’s exactly what I asked him, and he was very forthcoming with his experiences in the hope of helping others with their own journey.

InfoWorld: What benefits has your company realized since deploying a virtualized infrastructure?

Vincent Biddlecombe: As our company has gone through the process of converting to a virtualized infrastructure, we have realized many benefits. Some of them we expected, such as more efficient use of hardware as we consolidated many physical servers into fewer hypervisor servers. It also came as no surprise that virtualization has allowed us to create additional environments on-demand, which is particularly useful when it comes to creating test or development servers. Virtualization also solves our production server scalability challenge since we can quickly add new servers when needed.

But we have also realized additional benefits. Virtualization has allowed us to lower our database licensing costs, and we have streamlined our process for creating disaster recovery servers. We can more easily test our disaster recovery plan, which means we are better prepared should disaster strike, and if necessary we can restore computer operations in less time.

InfoWorld: What prompted you to consider converting to a virtualized infrastructure?

Biddlecombe: When we first considered converting our server infrastructure to a virtual environment, the decision came in conjunction with our plans to move our production environment to a co-location facility; it was also time to refresh our server hardware. Because we deliver services to our customers via the SaaS model, we needed to maintain our 24/7 world-class functionality, hosting, availability, reliability, and scalability.

We also wanted to maintain our reliable disaster recovery process while adding more flexibility to deploy multiple environments. This includes test and development as well as customer user acceptance, sales demo, and load testing environments. We felt that a virtual infrastructure would provide us with all of these attributes at a more reasonable cost compared to a new physical infrastructure. We first thought of virtualization when considering a tiered storage strategy and a disaster recovery plan across multiple environments. We determined virtualization would help us move data quickly to the right storage source depending on our needs. We also realized virtualization would make it easier to deploy redundancy in our production environment along with the horsepower to run disaster recovery and other environments.

Additionally, because virtualization reduces the number of CPUs we need, it would also help us manage the cost of our CPU-based Oracle licenses. This was a critical factor since licensing costs grow even more when creating a near real-time disaster recovery center. When a near-real-time data copy is used in disaster recovery, Oracle requires the same licensing model on both sides.

InfoWorld: In what specific ways has the virtualized infrastructure helped you reduce IT costs?

Biddlecombe: By reducing the overall number of CPUs we needed to purchase, the VMware virtual environment we deployed saved us significantly. We also discovered that IBM POWER6 servers combined with the AIX operating system would allow us to deploy fewer but faster processors at the database tier. This allowed us to further lower our Oracle licensing costs. Another cost-savings feature also involved AIX along with the IBM p570 servers we use at the database layer. The servers have logical partitions for which we can allocate as much memory and CPU power as we want, and we can share excess capacity across the partitions. By virtualizing the logical partitions, we can scale quicker and easier. In addition, since the databases are on shared storage, we can create extra partitions for other production servers to failover to if necessary.

InfoWorld: Has virtualization also helped you with other components of your IT infrastructure?

Biddlecombe: Yes, the virtualization of our Oracle infrastructure allows us to run test and development environments on much smaller partitions with the ability to scale up should we need to. If we want to conduct load testing, we just reconfigure and scale up the development partitions to accommodate a load test. If we run a disaster recovery process, we can use the whole box to run production.

For storage, we use virtualized Network Appliance devices for which we have configured classic enterprise shared storage. We use the devices to create extra copies of our database for test and development. Previously when we wanted to refresh the test and development database, we had to take a full copy of production, which took 12-24 hours and required a lot of storage. Now, we just create a snap copy of the disaster recovery copy, which is an up-to-date production copy. It takes very little space, and the process occurs within minutes.

At the application layer, most of our code is custom written in Java running on BEA WebLogic application servers. For hardware, we use Dell 2950 servers with two quad processors and 32GB of RAM. We also added extra NICs to the servers for the subnets that connect the servers to our storage. All of the application layer servers are virtualized using VMware.

A key virtualization feature that comes into play at the application layer is VMware’s vMotion capability. This allows us to create a cluster of three or four severs to which we can add 20-40 virtual servers. vMotion manages the servers by monitoring how busy each server is and automatically moves a virtual server from one physical server to another if the original physical server is too busy. This occurs in real time without any interruption to the application.

InfoWorld: What lessons have you learned from your virtualization deployment that you can pass along to other IT executives?

Biddlecombe:

• When assessing the cost of converting to a virtual environment, it’s important to realize that virtualization requires additional network storage, since it takes 20GB to load the OS of a virtual machine.
• You will also need additional NICs for the separate network subnets between the virtual machines and the storage devices.
• When you add the cost of the virtual operating system software and the extra memory you will require, your cost per server goes up. Alternately, when you consider that you can consolidate up to 10 virtual servers into one physical server, the overall savings becomes considerable — not just in up-front hardware costs, but also in terms of power and cooling costs as well as datacenter space.
• It’s important to understand the licensing requirements of your software vendors. Most vendors offer CPU-based licensing, but they may factor in extra costs for virtual servers. Virtualization makes it easy to add new servers, but software vendors may want to charge extra for each server added. Use of dedicated VMware clusters can help in this regard.

InfoWorld: How would you assess the results of your virtualization deployment?

Biddlecombe: Now that we have deployed a virtual infrastructure across most of our network, we have generated several benefits for the company. Not only did we save on hardware costs by decreasing the number of CPUs we needed, we also addressed the challenge of how to create databases when we need to.

Virtualization also solved the challenge of replicating data to our disaster recovery server, and we can now create additional environments on-demand without having servers specifically reserved for each environment. Our virtual machine clusters might run test virtual machines one day and load testing the next. Or they could be running disaster recovery — we can choose which virtual machines we want running at any moment in time. This helps solve the challenge of scalability since we can simply add new servers to the cluster whenever we want.

Most importantly, virtualization has allowed us to maintain our 24/7 world-class functionality, hosting, availability, and reliability for our customers.

I’d like to again thank Vincent Biddlecombe, the executive vice president and CTO of Transplace, for speaking with me.

This article, “Lessons learned while deploying a virtual infrastructure in the datacenter” was originally published at InfoWorld.com.