About The dti
The South African Department of Trade and Industry (the dti) is tasked with ensuring growth, employment and equity in the country's economy. With an annual budget of more than 16 billion Rand and over 1,200 employees, the dti produces statistics on the South African economy, promotes inward investment, fosters employment creation and helps the government deliver on its promise of economic empowerment for all.
Challenge
The dti had already completed a pilot of server virtualisation for its disaster recovery site, using PlateSpin® Orchestrate from Novell to manage virtual copies of its most business-critical servers. The organisation wanted to extend the benefits of server virtualisation to its main production site, where it was facing considerable pressure on floorspace and power supplies.
For production environments, where performance is an issue, it can be a significant challenge to size new physical servers correctly for a given workload of virtual machines. Most smaller servers—particularly those running Windows—may only average 5 or 10 percent utilisation, but will have peaks and troughs of utilisation at different times of the day, week and month.
The dti needed a way to determine which production servers could be virtualised together on the same hardware, based on expected performance and availability demands.
Novell Solution
Novell Consulting® worked with Linux System Dynamics (LSD), a leading Novell Partner, to determine the optimal path to virtualisation at the dti. The combined team used PlateSpin Recon, a Novell solution, to monitor the dti servers for just over one month, producing a detailed report with recommendations for virtualisation.
"We needed to determine which machines would be the easiest and most effective to virtualise—in a nutshell, those with the lowest average utilisation," said Poppy Tshabalala, Chief Information Officer at the dti. "PlateSpin Recon gave us a detailed view, pinpointing the servers that would most benefit from being virtualised."
Of the 55 servers in the dti's primary data centre, a significant number could not be virtualised because of vendor software licensing conditions, while some others running shared services for other departments fell outside the scope of the project. The dti asked LSD to monitor 23 servers in total.
"PlateSpin Recon worked unobtrusively in the background, and had no impact on the performance or availability of our production systems," said Tshabalala. "At the end of the monitoring period, it delivered extremely detailed and comprehensive reports, showing us exactly what each server was doing over the period—right down to the temperature of the hardware."
When planning a server virtualisation and consolidation exercise, it is vital to consider more than just the average utilisation figure on each server. For example, it might seem that ten dual-core servers, each with average utilisation of five percent, could be comfortably accommodated as virtual machines on a single new dual-core server. However, if all ten of the virtual servers peak at 80 percent utilisation between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. on a Monday morning, the new host hardware will be massively underpowered.
PlateSpin Recon gave the dti the concrete data it needed to build its server virtualisation strategy, with consolidation scenarios showing how the peaks and troughs of different combinations of virtual servers would combine when running together.
Results
Using PlateSpin Recon, the dti gained a clear view of the changing pattern of resource utilisation across its infrastructure. Based on the specifications of the new HP DL580 blade servers that it was planning to buy, the dti concluded that it would be able to achieve an 11 to 1 consolidation ratio.
"PlateSpin Recon highlighted 11 Windows servers that we can virtualise and run side-by-side on a single new HP DL580," said Tshabalala. "In practice, we will deploy the virtual servers on a two-node cluster for high availability, hosted by SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server."
Going from 11 servers to just two will reduce the power and cooling requirements by 75 percent, making the environment much more cost-effective and environmentally friendly. The dti will also make significant savings in the ongoing acquisition of server hardware, and will be able to focus any investments in server upgrades on two servers rather than 11.
"Beyond the savings in hardware and operational costs, moving to a virtualised server environment means that we'll eliminate all of our potential single points of failure," said Tshabalala. "Currently, a failure of one of the 11 servers will completely knock out the service running on that machine. In the future, the loss of individual processors or even one entire server from the cluster will not cause any downtime."