Servers, of course, are pieces of physical equipment; they come with their own processing, memory, storage resources and operating systems. What the Simplot team did was use virtualization tools from VMware, a virtual infrastructure company, to create software-only servers that interacted with the network just like hardware servers, although they were really only applications. Whenever Simplot needed another server it would just flip the switches appropriate to the server type (Web, application, database, e-mail, FTP, e-commerce and so on). From that point, an automated template generated the virtual machine on a specific VMware ESX host machine.

Virtual Improvements

According to Tony Adams, a technology analyst at Simplot, there were gains all across the board. The time to get a new server up and running on the system went from weeks to hours or less. Uptime also increased, because the servers were programs and could run on any supported x86 hardware anywhere. If a machine failed or needed maintenance, the virtual server could be quickly moved to different hardware.

Perhaps most important were the gains in utilization efficiencies. Servers are built for specific roles. Sometimes demand for a particular role is in sync with available resources, but usually it isn’t. In the case of "real" servers, if there is a mismatch, then there is nothing that you can do about it; you’re stuck with what you have. If you end up with an average utilization rate of 10 percent per server, so be it. (The need to provide for peak demand makes the problem worse, and utilization can often be far below even 10 percent.) Low utilization means IT is stuck with unnecessary maintenance issues, security faces unnecessary access issues (they have to worry about protecting more machines), and facilities must deal with unnecessary heat and power issues.

Virtualization fixes these problems. The power to design any kind and number of servers that you like allows you to align capacity with load continuously and precisely. In the case of Simplot, once Adams’s servers turned virtual, he was able to deploy nearly 200 virtual servers on only a dozen physical machines. And, he says, typical CPU, network, disk and memory utilization on the VMware ESX boxes is greater than 50 percent—compared with utilization of around 5 percent on dedicated server hardware.

Virtualization also makes disaster recovery planning simpler, because it allows you to write server clusters appropriate to whatever infrastructure you have on hand. As Adams points out, conventional disaster recovery schemes force you to have an exact clone of your hardware sitting around doing nothing. "But personally, what I really like," he says, "is the remote manageability. I can knock out new [servers] or do repairs anywhere on the Net, without even going to the data center."