Success breeds success

Faced with a similar situation on the Wintel side of the house in August 2006, Lextron once again calculated its options. The company had been using 40 physical servers to support its Microsoft Windows environment, including Exchange, SharePoint, CRM and Web services, as well as file and print.

"We had servers that needed to be replaced and we had a track record of taking multiple physical servers and combining them into one," Hays says. "Virtualization seemed like an obvious project to at least investigate."

The company decided to virtualize its 40 servers and run them all on a cluster of two HP x64 DL-360 servers, each with 20GB of memory and running VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3) software. Hays says the decision to use just two physical servers hinged on VMware's licensing costs. "It's just a math problem," Hays says. "I can buy more VMware licenses and spread them over cheaper servers, or I can buy more expensive, robust servers and fewer VMware licenses. I just projected the total cost of ownership for a 36-month period, and using these four boxes was optimal mathematically."

Plus, the move enabled Lextron to eliminate three racks of equipment, along with 45 percent of its power and cooling costs. And it increased productivity overall, especially in IT. "If someone needed a test server in the old world, you had to find a physical box, and make sure it had the right physical features -- CPU, memory, the right network connection," Hays says. "Sometimes, we had to purchase a new server just to test a particular application. That's all eliminated with virtual machines. They're very easy to build up and take back down."

Plus, with virtualization and fewer physical servers, Lextron was able to go to the next big step, implementing what Hays calls "push-button" disaster recovery.

"Because of virtualization, we were able to rent a much smaller facility for a disaster-recovery center -- if you looked at it, you might even think it was a broom closet," he says. The [disaster-recovery] site has just two server racks, an inline cooling unit, and UPS and battery backup. Plus, Hays uses Vizioncore's vReplicator software to replicate virtual machines from the primary site to the backup site.

"I have virtual Exchange Server 'A' sitting in my production data center, and multiple times a day, Vizioncore takes a snapshot of everything that's unique about it — the server, the database — and it passes that data over to virtual Exchange Server 'B' at the [disaster-recovery] site," says Hays, noting that the disaster-recovery site is located 3 miles away and is linked to the production site via a 180Mbps connection. "From a command console, I can tell it to automatically switch over to Exchange Server B and run all my users, and my users wouldn't know the difference. It's push-button [disaster-recovery]."