Virtualization on the Intel Platform Scott Elliott Senior Systems Network Specialist Christie Digital A Customer Implementation with VMware and IBM

About Christie Digital A leader in visual solutions for business, entertainment and industry Head office for Manufacturing & Operations in Kitchener, ON Head office for Sales & Marketing in Cypress, CA Numerous AV Industry Awards; won 2 Oscars for technical achievement

CDS: A good problem to have Explosive growth: doubled in size in less than 2 years Global Information Services (GIS) had to quickly adapt to increasing business needs GIS faced the usual suspects: –Provisioning takes too long –Too many “one application, one box” requests –Proliferation of hardware surpassed server room cooling capacity –Legacy Applications were on older and dying hardware No time to manage all the requests

VI3: Stop the Madness Virtual Center – recycled older rack-mount hardware 2 servers running ESX Server –With shared Storage; created an ESX Cluster VM Converter – Migrate physical to virtual Patch Repository for ESX Server – IIS Server VCB Proxy – Leverage an existing utility server

VMotion What is it? –Live migration of virtual machines from one physical host to another –Supported on Fibre Channel and iSCSI SAN and NAS

Dynamic Resource Scheduling What is it? –Dynamic balancing of computing resources across resource pools –Intelligent resource allocation based on pre-defined rules –Automate hardware maintenance Resource Pool Business Demand

Increase Capacity Easily Add hardware dynamically Provisioning is “fire and forget” Easily add more capacity Resource Pool CPU 36GHz, Mem 58GB Priority HIGH Resource Pool CPU 50 GHz, Mem 70GB Priority HIGH

Before and After Current Method Un-box, rack and cable Configure hardware Install Operating System Install Patches Configure server for GIS “standards” Using VMware Right-click template, select “create new virtual machine” Wait for file copy Adjust machine settings as appropriate Assuming hardware is available, deployment takes approximately 1 business day Assuming capacity is available, deployment takes approximately minutes

8 th Layer of the OSI model Three pronged approach to getting approval –Get influential techies on your side –Leverage any publicly announced environment policies –Play dirty; talk about money

A Gentle Introduction Get developers and IT professionals comfortable with Virtualization “Virtual Lab in a box” Semi-powerful desktop –4 GB of RAM, Dual-Core CPU, RAID Controller, extra NIC Use Linux OS (Red Hat, CentOS, etc); –Install VMware Server (free!)

Reducing the Carbon Footprint CDS is ISO certified VMware Infrastructure 3 has considerable impact on GIS’s positive contribution to the Policy VMware Infrastructure 3 can: Reduce the amount of physical hardware (and thus raw materials) Reduce energy consumption to power servers Reduce cooling requirements, and thus energy consumption “We are fully committed to environmental solutions …and to meet or exceed applicable environmental laws, regulations and organizational objectives.”

Return on Investment In the 2 quarters, 11 known projects that require a server $3000Low $1500 Still have to add in cost for a blade $30 K $85 K$63 K$46.5 K Options: VMware Infrastructure 3 Investment = $51 K Plus still have the capacity for 11 more virtual machines! $55 K$33 K$16.5 K

Lesson’s Learned –Leverage the Sales Engineer! –Read the fine print… –The virtual world still requires patches –Don’t forget third-party solutions and add-ons