'We will save 284 lakhs with server virtualization'

BANGALORE, INDIA: Venkat Iyer, chief information officer, Wockhardt Ltd. and Biju John, head, Infra & Security, Wockhardt group share their experience with server virtualization and future plans for virtualization technology. Excerpts:

CIOL: When did you go for server virtualization and how much time did it take to complete the process?

VI & BJ: We set-up server virtualization infrastructure in July 2012. The server virtualization implementation consisting of setting up of the network, servers, storage, and conversion of physical to virtual took us around three months.

CIOL: What were the benefits and how much was the investment?

VI & BJ: Benefits:

a) Power saving up to 70 per cent.

b) Faster Provisioning of Servers - Physical versus virtual (Few Weeks to hours).

c) Faster roll out of applications

d) Higher uptime, due to HA feature of VMware

e) Virtualization has resulted in higher efficiency, flexibility, scalability, stability, availability, and recoverability

Investment:

a) The cost of 100 physical servers versus 100 VMs with the total capital investment for servers plus power and cooling cost has resulted in 58 per cent saving.

CIOL: What more are you planning in terms of virtualization?

VI & BJ: Once you put all the eggs in one basket - DR for critical servers is what we are planning. Security of the virtual infrastructure as a whole is very critical. Desktop virtualization is next in the agenda, using the same network, server chassis base and storage.

CIOL: Have you also undertaken storage and network virtualizations? Elaborate.

VI & BJ: We have gone in for storage and network virtualization also. We have implemented Cisco UCS with NetApps unified Storage Solution.

Storage Virtualization

ü Server Virtualization has enabled and demanded centralization and sharing of storage

ü It has enable us to have mobility of virtual machines between physical servers for load balancing,

ü To Increase high availability

ü Improved Disaster recovery

ü Operational recovery of virtual machine images

Network Virtualization

Cisco UCS has the concept of Unified IO (NIC & HBA coupled into one).

Distinct and isolated LAN & SAN interfaces with single adapter, allowing bandwidth reservations made possible.

CIOL: What are advantages of Unified I/O versus traditional I/O?

VI & BJ: Following are the advantage of Unified I/O versus traditional I/O.

ü High performance and low latency line rate IO performance~500 KIOPs.

ü Flexible - Create any number and type of adapters (up to 128) with a single physical adapter.

ü Deploy QoS to provide application level traffic engineering.

ü Provides Fabric Failover - no need for NIC teaming certification for every OS.

ü Scalable Management - centralize adapter management throuugh service profiles.

CIOL: By how much, in terms of number of servers and capex investment, has your expenses come down after this?

VI & BJ: As of now 100 physical servers have been virtualized into 6 physical severs, a couple of more VMs are being planned in the next few months. HA capacity is built into the design.

We have estimated saving up to 58 per cent amounting to a value of 284 lakhs over a of period of three years (Capex, power and cooling cost taken into consideration -physical 100 server versus 100 VMs).

CIOL: Were there any upfront investments done before you took up server virtualization?

VI & BJ: We had taken up the Network revamp before the actual virtualisation project started. Since the network switches were due for change, we did not feel the pinch. We went in for 4x10 G backbone from the virtualised environment to the core switching with redundancy.

Therefore, the implementation of virtualised environment did not have any major issue This is the gray areas where the server virtualisation fails, which has been well take care in the Wockhardt Virtualisation Design.

CIOL: By how much did utilization capacity of servers go up?

VI & BJ: The virtualisation server utilization has gone upto 60 per cent. Twenty per cent of the capacity is reserved for unforeseen loads and for high availability purpose.

CIOL: Were there any issues while implementing server virtualization and can you please share a few learnings?

VI & BJ: We had done a good amount of planning and POC before we actually went live. We adopted a 80:20 rule, wherein we invested 80 per cent of the time planning and 20 per cent on actual implementation. We also invested a good amount of time in evaluating the products, we went in for Cisco UCS servers, Cisco Nexus for core switching, NetApp for storage and VMware's hypervisor.The Implementation partner for this project was S K International.

The implementation was smooth without any major issues.