"The one area we haven't addressed is, are all the VMs sized properly," Biddlecombe says. "I think we've given some VMs more memory than they need. Our emphasis to date has been application performance. The last layer will be reducing VM resources so they have just enough," he says. The IT team can get some of the memory data from the SiteScope tool, but they have to do one VM at a time, he notes. This is the need that's making him consider finding another management tool.

For securing the virtual environment, Transplace's IT team applies the same security tools (McAfee antivirus and others) and practices that they would with a physical server, Biddlecombe says.

Provisioning in 30 Minutes or Less

As for metrics to prove his success, Biddlecombe says he wasn't able to do many before and after comparisons because so many factors changed at once: a new data center location, new hardware and all those new VMs all got wrapped up into the same effort. What he can measure however, is how quickly he can provision a new server or new computing power to the business side. It used to take him a week to provision a server: Now it takes 30 minutes.

"We have gained a dramatically increased capacity to provision new servers, and more scalability," he says.

The ability to scale to add VMs right away helps Transplace deal with any spikes in data throughput from its customers: "Because we're SaaS, our customers benefited immediately," he says.

And when IT wants to create a test and development VM, or a business executive needs a new customer demonstration environment, IT can do it within the half hour, he notes.

In another benefit of the highly-virtualized environment, the servers at the disaster recovery site can serve double duty, Biddlecombe says. They can be test VMs one moment, and disaster recovery the next. "We don't have to have 100 servers just standing there waiting for disaster," he says.

What's next on Biddlecombe's to-do list with regards to virtualization? He'll continue to ensure that the backup strategy is solid, he says. "There's this concept that I'm putting a lot of eggs in one basket," he says. "We use VMware Consolidated Backup, but you also have to make sure all your OS patches are applied, backups done properly. You want to make sure you're doing the blocking and tackling."

© 2009 CXO Media Inc.