Server Consolidation Project

We are working on a Server Consolidation Project at work and I thought that this would be a good place to share our strategies, challenges and accomplishments. I will touch base on how we see Server Consolidation and outline a couple of our strategies.

Overview
Server Consolidation is an approach to effectively use computer resources in order to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership and reduce the total number of servers required to support our applications. Two technologies are frequently associated with Server Consolidation, Server Virtualization and the adoption of Blade Server Technology.

We are looking to gain experience with both the Blade Hardware, and VMware software environments, and then incorporate them into our support mix. Both technologies show great promise to deliver better system utilization from our Intel based servers, however we need to gain some real world experiences with this technology to best determine which applications work best on blade and which applications are better suited to the VM virtual environment.

Virtualization
Server Virtualization is the masking of server resources (physical servers, processors, memory, and disk capacity) from the users by transforming these resources into virtual resources which can be pooled and moved around to better meet the computing needs of an organization.

There are a number of Virtualization Products available for the Intel market: VMware, and Microsoft Virtual Server. We have invested time demoing VMware and Microsoft Virtual Server, and have selected VMware and the VMware ESX server as our Virtualization Product.

VMware ESX Server is virtual infrastructure software for partitioning, consolidating and managing servers in mission-critical environments. ESX is suited for enterprise data centers and helps to minimize the total cost of ownership of computing infrastructure by increasing resource utilization, and improving the system provisioning and system management process.

The ESX product appeared more stable and mature, and has been identified as the “best virtualization software for consolidating windows servers that handle mission critical workloads” by the Gartner Group. The Gartner Group predicts that by 2008, 90% of all virtual-machine deployments will be on Hypervisor’s or virtual products that directly interface with the Hardware, like the VMware ESX server, as opposed to the Microsoft Virtual Server product that is installed as an application on top of a Microsoft Operating System (MS Server 2003).

Blade Technology
Blade Technology is a redundant server chassis with thin modular servers known as Blades. Each Blade is a computer server incorporated into a modular server card with individual CPU, memory and disk resources. Most of the major vendors offer a Blade Configuration, and we have chosen the IBM BladeCenter product.

Our initial testing strategy will be to :

• Merging low cpu and low memory usage applications onto virtual servers
• Move high cpu and high memory usage applications onto blade servers

Industry Notes
The value proposition for server consolidation (blade and virtualization) is increased utilization, saving on power, space, server maintenance and easing the complexities associated with deploying many servers.

There are a few concerns associated with server consolidation. Companies implementing Blade technologies need to consider the power and cooling impacts on the data center, especially with over populated racks. Also, there are few hardware standards associated with blades today, which means that we could run into a compatibility issue in the future should Blade Infrastructure Technology change as it matures.

Also, Gartner points out that “the Blade format and Virtualization do not necessarily go hand and hand” for server consolidation. Consolidating and virtualizing on Blade servers (with 2 CPU’s), can leave companies with management of a large number of physical servers. Instead, Gartner identifies servers with large amounts of memory and 4 or 8 CPU’s as the ideal platforms for Virtualization. You will still have a large number of Virtual servers to manage, however they will all be located on one physical server.

At the same time, as we speak with others using Virtualization today, we have identified a trend where most large scale Production installations are on larger 4 CPU and 8 CPU servers each with 16, 32, or 64 gig of RAM. The trend makes us take a cautious look at adopting Virtualization within our Blade Consfiguration.

Summary
The Blade and Virtual tools available today are a compelling strategy in the adoption of Server Consolidation. These tools will help us to be more cost effective in our server purchases, server utilization, and server support strategies. In the long term, Server Consolidation will help us with decreased server expenditures and lower the overall cost of server maintenance. There are also a number of softer infrastructure costs that will be saved surrounding Data Center Footprint, cabling and deployment.

The adoption of these new tools provides us with more options when deploying new applications or expanding current applications, however our challenge will be to come up to speed quickly, manage the deployment effectively and mainstream these tools as soon as possible

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