Case: Virtualization in key business applications

Do you want to virtualize 95% of your production servers in a year? The following is the experience of implementing virtualization by the chief technology officer of Transplace, a logistics company. His company did not initially have any virtualization technology, and later, the company's mission-critical applications were running on virtual machines.

Many CIOs want to know how far they are from application virtualization and how quickly virtualization applications can run. Once you've tasted the benefits of server virtualization implementation, such as cost savings, flexibility, and speed up deployment, you'll take immediate action to successfully apply virtualization technology. Transplace company chief Technology officer Vincent Biddlecombe no longer confused. He has just completed a meaningful leap.

Since the middle of 2007, Biddlecombe has virtualized the servers The Transplace company plans to use in production. He has been running the company's most important application in VMware ESX environments (its own development of transportation software) without any major failures.

By the way, when Biddlecombe started implementing the virtualization program, none of his company's 100 IT staff had virtualization experience or VMware experience. ' We are companies that use sun products, ' he said. To address the problem of virtualization, he hired a consulting partner, Catapult Systems.

Time is everything.

For Transplace companies, the 2007 virtualization leap in business and technical aspects of the significance. Business requirements: Transplace works with its customers through software services, so the company needs the best scalability, availability, and manageability to host the customer's data. Virtualization is attractive in these areas.

On the technical side, the Transplace system is just about to be updated. In 2007, Transplace decided to relocate the resulting data center from Texas State Plano's corporate office to an outside-point shared facility in Dallas. Biddlecombe said the company is just about to upgrade its server hardware in this market. Therefore, it makes sense to implement virtualization when the server is upgraded.

For transplace database applications, Biddlecombe converts the application from Sun's server (using the Solaris System) to IBM's mid-range servers (POWER6 processors and p570 servers running the AIX operating system). For Transplace's mid-range server, he switched from Sun to Dell's PowerEdge 2950 server, using VMware's ESX server software for virtualization. For storage, Transplace selected FAs 3070 of the Network appliance company.

' We need an environment where we can provide maximum availability between our production and disaster recovery data centers, ' says Biddlecombe. By using the combination of VMware and storage, we have effectively replicated our servers to the disaster Recovery data Center.

Biddlecombe expects his production environment to achieve 95% virtualization by the end of the year. "This is a huge step forward," said Chris Wolf, analyst at Burton Group, a marketing research firm. In my experience, organizations can virtualize 40% of their servers in a year and do a good job.

Overall, Biddlecombe's IT department now runs about 110 virtual machines. Two important applications he did not run on the virtual machine were his Microsoft Exchange Server and SQL Server database. Both applications have very large data input/output volumes.

Business-Critical applications use virtualization

An ERP application that runs important tasks on a virtual machine makes many CIOs nervous about trying. However, Biddlecombe is an exception. Transplace's key business application is a transport management system. The system deals with 4 million transport operations per year, and the annual shipping costs are 2.75 billion dollars. This mission-critical application runs very well during the first month of implementation of virtualization.

This system was developed within the Transplace company using the Java language, running on the BEA WebLogic Application Server and Oracle system to make the database work. Biddlecombe specifically uses 50 virtual machines to support the components of a transport system running on a WebLogic server, with 50 and 60 virtual machines responsible for other components and everything else.

To determine the correct number of virtual machines and balance the workload of servers running important virtual machines, the company's IT team conducted extensive testing. But they have other advantages that companies with ERP systems don't have: Because the system is developed in-house, they are familiar with the software's performance problems. ' We immediately know what our software needs, ' says Biddlecombe.

Interestingly, Biddlecombe has so far found no need to purchase any new Third-party management tools from any emerging virtualization enterprise, even though he has to deal with new requirements. To support tiered monitoring methods, he currently uses HP's Business Availability Center tool at the advanced level, using HP's SiteScope at the next level (measuring the amount of memory used by each application in each virtual machine), and then using network and database monitoring tools. He also uses VMware's vmotion tools to move virtual machines as needed.

Biddlecombe said that one of the questions we haven't solved is: are these virtual machines the right size? We think we've provided some virtual machines with more memory than they need. Our focus so far has been on application performance. The final level will be to reduce the resources of the virtual machine, so that only the virtual machine has enough resources. The IT team uses the SiteScope tool to get some memory data, but the tool can only parse one virtual machine at a time. This demand led him to consider finding another management tool.

To keep the virtual environment secure, Transplace's IT team used the same security tools (McAfee antivirus and other tools) they used to ensure physical server security, Biddlecombe said.

Complete the configuration in 30 minutes or less

As for the criteria for proving its success, Biddlecombe said he was able to quickly configure a new server or new computing power to handle business-friendly issues. In the past, it took one weeks for him to configure a server, and now it only takes 30 minutes. We have significantly increased computing capacity and increased scalability by configuring new servers.

Biddlecombe says the ability to rapidly increase the capacity of virtual machines to expand computing capacity can help transplace companies deal with peak customer data throughput. Because we are using the software services, our customers get this benefit immediately.

It can meet these requirements within half an hour when it wants to create a virtual machine for testing and development, or when business officials need a new customer presentation environment.

Another benefit of a highly virtualized environment is that servers in a disaster-recovery site can perform dual tasks, Biddlecombe said. They can test the virtual machines this time, and they can do disaster recovery next time. ' We don't have 100 servers waiting for a disaster to happen, ' he said.

Biddlecombe What is the next thing you need to do to virtualize? Continue to ensure the reliability of this backup strategy. We used VMware consolidated backup. However, make sure that all of your operating systems are patched and backed up correctly. Be sure to do things that integrate error prevention and beneficial production.