To date, IT has virtualized 25 to 26 percent of First American's servers, Jafa says. These include many production servers, plus test and development and staging boxes. In some cases, whole business units now have had all their servers virtualized, he says. "My goal is to reach 50 percent virtualized this year," he adds.

"Any server that IT's using is going virtual," Jafa says, which means some 300 servers will be consolidated onto seven or eight physical machines. "We continue to work on virtualizing disaster recovery." Jafa is bringing disaster recovery in house: "That's going to be completely virtualized", he says, noting he hopes to complete the DR project by end of year.

Virtualization has also helped Jafa's team as the company consolidates and centralizes IT services for an array of business units. "The process of bringing them on and migrating them has become faster," Jafa says, noting that the company's IT provisioning has improved by a factor of 65 percent, changing from weeks to days.

On the disaster recovery and high availability front, virtualization has given Jafa equally dramatic results. For every 100 servers, he now puts aside four servers for failover purposes and six to eight servers for workload help at peak usage time for the company's customers. Previously, the company's high availability arrangement meant that he needed to put aside 200 servers for the same purpose.

Politics and Process Lessons

But server virtualization is the start of the changes at First American, not the end. "As we started to think about virtualization, we started to think about standardization," says Jafa, as in standardizing processes and utilizing shared resources, across not only servers but also storage and networking technology.

In the course of doing his planning, he's run across two key challenges IT leaders cited in CIO's recent survey, Your Virtualized State in 2008: Workload balancing and IT staff management issues.

"Capacity planning has become critical in the virtual world," Jafa says. "That's one we're still maturing and figuring out. We're using some of the HP [SiteScope] tools for capacity planning."

On the staff issue, he says he hasn't had to deal with much squabbling among IT members who are being asked to work together in new ways, noting his team is mostly excited about virtualization. The bigger political challenge, he says, involved First American's diverse collection of business groups. "We have many business units and to get them off the notion of 'my servers' and 'my storage' took a lot of work," Jafa says. "I credit our (IT) change management organization."