I have just joined the team here at the Resource Action Program. I am excited to be working at company that strives to make our world a better place to live.
Today, I would like to talk about a task that my team accomplished last year. We did a conversion from Novell to Active Directory. We virtualized our server farm with VMWare.
This setup allowed us to take about 50 physical servers offline. We ran all of these servers on 2 HP DL380s and a HP MSA 1000 SAN. We duplicated that same environment for our disaster recovery site.
The virtualization of the server farm was not cheap, but the cost of powering that server room went down significantly. Over time that cost will be made up in electricity alone.
Virtualization allowed us many administrative benefits as well. With VMWare, you have many tools you can use to optimize maintenance, backups and Disaster Recovery scenarios. This cost is usually not factored in to many companies ROI research.
Some of the optimized areas are:
Snapshot your servers for quick backup and recovery
Vmotion a server to hardware that has low usage without taking the server offline
Reboot a server in a fraction of the time
So we made our lives easier for our system’s administrators, We made the accountants happy when the utility bills had to be paid and we may have helped save a chunk of ice in the arctic wilderness for a polar bear to float on!
