Government Technology - March 2008 - (Page 36)

Much interest in virtualization focuses on servers. One important reason data center managers create virtual servers is to consolidate facilities, running more applications on fewer physical boxes. That strategy offers several benefits, said Gary Chen, senior analyst with the Yankee Group. “No. 1, you’ll save money on hardware: You won’t have to buy as many servers. No. 2, you’ll save money on space.” Most government agencies and private companies pay for data centers based on square footage, he said. “No. 3, you’ll also save on power,” Chen added. That’s good for the environment as well as for the financial ledger, he said. Virtual servers also make it easy to troubleshoot hardware and plan for disaster recovery. Because virtual servers are simply software, if the box they’re running on experiences hiccups or crashes altogether, it’s easy to slide them onto another piece of hardware, leaving end-users none the wiser, Bengel said. Spin it up The server farm in Tennessee’s state government data center hosts 350 virtual machines. If a physical server breaks down entirely, the storage area network (SAN) that houses the virtual servers can send them to a different box, Bengel said. “It gives you tremendous flexibility to perform maintenance in the middle of the day, which you normally couldn’t ever do.” And if a disaster hits the data center, the SAN can send any virtual server to a backup location. “I can just spin it up at another farm at another site, and everything is intact, including the IP address.” Virtual servers work well for testing updates, code changes and patches, said Rob Campbell, senior technology specialist with the Microsoft Federal Team. They also reduce the amount of hardware a person needs to lug around when demonstrating applications, he said. “If I want to set up a demo environment that has multiple servers and clients interacting, I can do all of that on top of one laptop, because each of the demo machines can run in a virtual environment,” Campbell said. A virtual server also is an ideal platform for software developers who need a machine for a few months, said Max Arnold, Tennessee’s executive director of data center operations. “Once they have [the software] developed, they no longer require that server,” Arnold said. The data center can simply absorb the virtual server back into the farm. “So you’re not stuck with a large investment that you no longer need.” That’s just one example of the flexibility that makes virtual servers easier to manage than physical machines. Instead of requiring a computer and an operating system to run an application, you just need a few files, Chen said. “I can move them to any server that has the virtualization software installed on it, whether it’s local or half-way across the world. And you can do it just like copying files.” Leading companies that offer virtualization software include VMware, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and Citrix. One thing virtual servers don’t do well is run large, demanding applications that need to move large streams of data through the CPU quickly. “The translation between the virtual hardware and the physical will have a performance hit,” Campbell said. “You should virtualize based on intended workload and the performance profile.” “If you have a large application that has a tremendous amount of I/O [input/output], whether it be a database, or an application server, virtualization may not be your best candidate,” Bengel said. More Machines, More Work Officials in Tennessee’s IT office became interested in virtualization when the state began working toward a centralized computing model. Back when client/server systems were in vogue, the volume of data passing over limited bandwidth prompted agencies to house servers in their own facilities. As network bandwidth grew more abundant and the client/server model gave way to Webbased applications, the state moved servers back into a central data center. That posed a problem for the data center: More machines meant more work for the technical team. “I wanted to be able to do consolidation while minimizing the amount of additional staff that I had to add to my data center,” Bengel said. By reducing the number of physical machines required in the center, virtualization allowed Tennessee to manage more servers with fewer employees. In the past, a systems analyst or systems programmer took charge of 25 to 30 machines, Arnold said. “Now I have upward of 70 machines per person.” The data center runs mostly Sun Fire X4600 machines, with an average of 25 virtual servers running on each dual-core box. There’s also a server farm with some single-core HP ProLiant DL580 servers, which average 10 virtual machines per box. The state uses VMware virtualization software. One of the initial challenges Tennessee IT officials faced as they implemented virtual servers was determining which applications would run well, and which made too many demands on the software. “We had to do some experimentation to find out,” Bengel said. They discovered that a virtual machine makes a great Web server or application server and can handle a small database, he said. “It doesn’t make quite as much sense with really big applications — although even with, for example, our Web servers on our [enterprise resource planning] application, which is one of the largest in MAR 08 JAN__08 36 http://www.govtech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - March 2008

Government Technology - March 2008 Contents Point of View Big Picture The Last Mile On the Scene Four Questions for... Top 25 Doers, Dreamers and Drivers Let's [Not] Get Physical No Data Left Behind Conservation King Community Drug Test Reinventing the System Better Late Than Never Closing the Deal Spectrum Products Personal Computing signal:noise Digital Communities The Expanding Focus of Digital Communities The Digital Imperative Hot Fusion Redefining Municipal Wireless Made in the USA Bridge Detectives The 2008 Agenda

Government Technology - March 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.