Virtualisation Multiplication

The Age

Tuesday October 14, 2008

Brad Howarth

THE University of Sydney has reorganised the way it delivers computer power to students and staff, providing what it says is better service at less cost.

The university has 45,000 students and 3500 staff spread across 10 campuses who need computer access.

The volume of technology used is massive and far-flung, creating management angst.

In 2006 the university introduced a technology called virtualisation, supplied by the US company VMware, which enables the workload from numerous servers to be run on a single device.

Each application runs in ignorance of other applications on the server in its own "virtual" server, and behaves as it would if running on a dedicated machine. Hence loads from less powerful servers can run on a smaller number of more powerful units.

Virtualisation has been a boom segment of the technology industry, propelling VMware into the spotlight where it is now facing challenges from established network players Microsoft and Citrix Systems.

According to the acting manager for servers and email services at the University of Sydney, Craig Hamilton, the university's goal is to reduce its power bill by eliminating underused servers, while also reducing administrative requirements. Mr Hamilton says half of the university's servers are virtualised today, with 306 virtual server loads running on 49 machines. He says the project is meeting goals of reducing energy consumption and reducing the management load on him and his team.

"We've gone from a few hundred physical servers to a mix of up to 600 virtual and physical servers, and our staff numbers have only gone up 20%."

The university also uses BMC's Patrol management software to monitor the performance of the virtual servers, ensuring they have the resources they need, such as processor and disk space, along with monitoring any services the server might be running.

Under the old system the databases would crash simply because they had run out of space, a problem which has now been eliminated.

"For all intents and purposes it's just like monitoring a physical machine," Mr Hamilton says.

The computer hardware is being moved into a centralised data centre.

But the ease of deployment of virtual servers has had an unexpected side effect, as the project to consolidate computer servers has inadvertently led to a proliferation of their virtual equivalents.

"In those two years we went from about 300 physical servers to 550 servers, with the bulk of server growth through virtualisation, to the point where virtualisation now represents over 60% of our server instances," Mr Hamilton says.

They have changed the way new servers are commissioned and the number of servers kept on standby in case of failure.

Managers of physical servers often have a second dedicated unit on standby.

The virtual environment makes it possible to quickly launch a new virtual server to cover such problems.

The university is now entering a second phase of its project, in which servers set up two or three years ago to run business applications are coming to the end of their lease.

Mr Hamilton expects to have virtualised 400 servers by the end of this year.

"I expect by the end of 2009 we'd be 90% virtualised," Mr Hamilton says.

© 2008 The Age

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