 ServersNetwork World's Servers Newsletter, 06/28/07How National Association of Home Builders moved beyond VMware, Part 2By Jennifer MearsWhat follows is the continuation of the edited transcript of my talk with John Yanekian, director of network services at the National Association of Home Builders in Washington, D.C. The NAHB has been running SWsoft in production for the past year and a half. In this part, Yanekian talks more about the features and advantages of Virtuozzo, SWsoft’s x86 server virtualization software. Mears: What kinds of benefits are you seeing from using Virtuozzo? Yanekian: We’ve consolidated 16 servers onto two production boxes. So we don’t have 16 individual servers we’d have to maintain and patch. That’s a good thing about Virtuozzo: since it virtualizes above the operating system, when you patch the host server, all your virtual servers are patched. I don’t have to go one-by-one and patch them.
Mears: What other features do you use? Yanekian: One of the things that amazes me with Virtuozzo is if you’re running a virtual server and you run out of disk space you can go to the management console and say, ‘Give it another 20 gigs.’ And before you reach the terminal server and refresh it, that 20 gigs is allocated to your OS partition and you have more room. You’re never going to run out of disk space. You can do the same with memory and CPUs, adding more memory or CPUs on the fly. Another good thing is you can back up one virtual server to another virtual server. You can cross back up, so if your virtual server dies or the host server dies for some reason, you can restore the backups on the surviving host until you fix the hardware. Mears: With Virtuozzo, you don’t need a SAN to move virtual servers, right? Yanekian: Right, Virtuozzo moves the data file, the hard drive file, to the other server and brings it up. Every server is allocated a folder with an ID and all your registry, all your files, all your data are in that private area. When you move the virtual server from one node to another, Virtuozzo moves that folder from one node to another and brings it right up. Mears: What kinds of savings are you seeing with Virtuozzo? Yanekian: We have 16 servers consolidated in virtual servers and I figure that average server costs between $6,000 and $8,000, so we saved that. We saved on network ports, power, KVM ports, rack space, cooling and heating. I’d say we save about $10,000 per server per year. And I don’t have to have the maintenance for the hardware. So I don’t have to buy the hardware and I don’t have to worry about patching it because I patched the host and everything is patched. Plus the OS license, which is another $800 dollars for standard and $3,000 for enterprise. Mears: So you’ve been able to streamline server management? Yanekian: It used to be that it would take a week to deploy a new server. The virtual servers we can do in minutes. Plus the patching advantages that I talked about save a lot of management time. SWsoft has its own Windows update equivalent. They have their own update manager so for any Microsoft update, they test it, they approve it and they release it to SWsoft customers. You download the stuff from them and you patch the host server and all your servers are patched, so that saves money in patching your servers. Mears: Is there anything that Virtuozzo doesn’t provide today that you’re looking for? VMware with Virtual Infrastructure 3 is now moving into the utility computing idea with some of the functions and features they have. Yanekian: At this point, I don’t know. Maybe a little bit better backup interface, better scheduling from within Virtuozzo for the backup. They have version 4.0 coming up, which seems like it’s going to be a significant step forward. At this point for what they’re doing, they have a very impressive product and the most impressive part about it is their support. Mears: Finally, what kind of advice would you give your peers who are now ready to look at virtualization, but aren’t sure how to decide which technology is best for them? Yanekian: It depends on the environment you have and how much money you want to invest. If running different OS versions is important for you, then you need to look into a solution that can give you that. If your environment is standard cookie cutter, one OS level, everything runs on the same level, then Virtuozzo is a superb product. We have a cookie cutter environment: all the drivers are the same on all of the servers, etc. So in our environment, SWsoft is a very cost-effective solution.
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| Contact the author: Jennifer Mears is a freelance journalist based in Arizona. She was previously senior editor at Network World focusing on server issues. E-mail her at jlmears@gmail.com.
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