Government Technology - March 2008 - (Page 37)

the state, we’ve found that virtualization is working great.” Tennessee’s virtual servers will soon find a new home in two data centers that the state is building to replace its 20-year-old, 70,000-square-foot facility. At 35,000 square feet apiece, each of the two new centers will house half the state’s active servers, and each will serve as the disaster recovery site for the other. If one center becomes unusable, staff can quickly move applications from virtual servers in one building to the other. “And actually, with all of our critical systems, we won’t even have to move the data over,” Bengel said. Each time a server in either center conducts a transaction, it will write the data simultaneously to SANs in both facilities. “The data will be in both places, so all we have to do is recover the physical boxes and systems, not the data,” he said. 3,000 and Counting Virtual servers also are part of the data management strategy at the Collier County Public Schools in Naples, Fla. But the school district has taken virtualization a step further. Following a successful pilot program of virtual desktops in 2006, it started implementing that technology in earnest. So far, Collier County Public Schools has served up 3,000 virtual desktops to end-users, and the number continues to grow. “Our goal with this first phase is to get up to 6,000,” said Thomas Petry, the school district’s director of technology. With some 44,000 students and 5,000 staff, the Collier County Schools operate a total of 25,000 desktops. District officials eventually would like 90 percent of them to be virtual machines, he said. Collier County hosts the virtual desktops on HP ProLiant BL35p blade servers running HP VMware ESX virtualization software. The servers “push” virtual desktops, including operating systems, configurations and applications, to users working on HP dc7600 thin clients. The main reason the school district started deploying virtual servers was to reduce the time technicians spent troubleshooting desktop machines in the field, Petry said. “It gives us more time to spend on other things besides just fixing the same old desktop problems over and over.” Because the virtual desktops reside in the district’s data center, technicians at a central help desk can solve most problems remotely. Technicians also can discard troublesome virtual machines and request new ones by clicking that option on the Web site where they log in. “To us, they’re not real machines, so they’re not commodities,” Petry said. Technicians delete the discarded machines, or if they think the trouble may recur, they can mark certain virtual desktops for further study. “We want to make sure we don’t have trends, where the same problem is happening to hundreds or thousands of machines,” Petry said. “As time permits, technicians review the machines that have been ‘trashed’ and see what was going on with them, why they were trashed.” The virtual desktops also offer substantial hardware savings, since thin clients don’t become obsolete nearly as fast as full-fledged PCs do. “They only have to be refreshed when major thin client technology refreshes. So you really only have to refresh the technology in the data center,” Petry said. If a user requires a faster computer, technicians simply assign more RAM or other resources to his or her virtual desktop — an easy software operation. Virtual desktops don’t work well for graphics-intensive applications, the kinds used by video editors or engineers, Petry said. “Those just do not play well in the virtual desktop space.” But only about 0.5 percent of the desktops in the Collier County Schools require that kind of power, so this limitation isn’t an issue, he said. User Pools One strategy the district pursued for phasing in virtual desktops is grouping together users who require the same applications and have similar workloads. Each of these groups forms a user pool, and the data center assigns each group a pool of generic desktops. When a user signs on, he or she doesn’t necessarily get the same desktop every time. But since all the desktops in the pool look and behave the same, the user doesn’t know the difference. The user can’t customize the desktop or install extra applications, but at the same time, there’s less chance a virtual PC user will make inadvertent changes that mess up desktops and drive IT technicians crazy. “If you can get users to the point where they can use as generic a desktop as possible, and you can do this application push — where they have the applications they need any time, anywhere — then it really reduces the workload on your technicians,” Petry said. For users whose jobs require custom configurations, the virtual desktop software provides “sticky sessions,” allowing them to get the same desktops every time they log in, Petry said. The major challenge Collier County faced in implementing virtual desktops was choosing a virtualization software package that met all its needs. “Even with the [VMware] Virtual Desktop Manager, we’re dealing with small glitches,” Petry said. The district is working with the vendor to iron those out. But virtualization technology definitely works; most users don’t know they’re not using standard PCs, Petry said. “It’s very seamless. People just seem to get in there and experience it for themselves and figure out how easy it is to use.” MERRILL DOUGLAS MDOUGLAS@STNY.RR.COM IS A WRITER BASED IN UPSTATE NEW YORK. SHE SPECIALIZES IN APPLICATIONS OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY. 37 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

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