Businesses using a virtualized infrastructure have many reasons to move active virtual machines (VMs) from one physical server to another. Whether the migrations are for routine maintenance, balancing performance needs, work distribution (consolidating VMs onto fewer servers during non-peak hours to conserve resources), or another reason, the best virtual infrastructure platform executes the move as quickly as possible and with minimal impact to end users.
Principled Technologies tested VMware vSphere 5 vMotion against Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 with Hyper-V Live Migration. According to Principled Technologies, VMware was faster, had greater stability and less impact on application performance.
As a Canadian leader that cares for 1 million patients annually, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre faced rising demand for services--but its main data center was reaching capacity. By virtualizing on Intel Xeon processors and upgrading the data center's cooling technology, Sunnybrook doubled the number of racks its data center can support and significantly reduced energy consumption.
Sunnybrook saves tens of thousands of dollars each year on electricity costs and earned a one-time Data Centre Incentive Program (DCIP) incentive award of CAD 33,360 from its utility provider, Toronto Hydro Electric System Ltd.
Is your organization looking to get away from expensive, UNIX RISC systems? The key question is, can industry standard Intel-architecture based servers deliver the performance you'd need to consolidate applications via virtualization?
Principled Technologies' test report from July 2011 says yes. In tests using the newest Intel Xeon processors and VMware vSphere 5.0, they tested 12 database applications simultaneously – and all delivered strong and consistent performance.
If your organization runs large business-critical database applications on expensive UNIX RISC systems, you may have felt stuck. Even as the percentage of enterprise workloads running on virtualized servers has exploded, you have faced a key question: Could industry-standard Intel architecture-based servers deliver the performance you'd need to consolidate your applications via virtualization?
This study proves that the answer is yes.
Reliability is a huge factor in choosing a server to host virtualized business-critical applications. If a RAM error brings your entire server to a halt, all the applications on it stop functioning. Principled Technologies loaded an Intel Xeon processor E7-4870 based server running VMware vSphere 5.0 with 12 virtual machines (VMs). Then they injected a memory error that affected one of the VMs.
In hands-on tests, the underlying hypervisor and remaining 11 VMs kept running. Only the single VM with the simulated memory error failed. In addition, VMware's hypervisor retired the memory space with the fault. Then VMware vCenter was able to gracefully restart the VM, delivering timely recovery of the service without user intervention. In repeat tests, the results were the same – the system continued to operate.
With business booming in Asia, Eli Lilly needed to implement Unicode, but required more data storage to handle the switch from ASCII to Unicode. At the same time, the company also decided to dump legacy RISC platforms, and virtualize where possible.
Moving Eli Lilly's operations wasn't trivial – the company needed to support 50,000 SAP users, maintain or improve its performance, and ensure that the move happen with no downtime.
How'd they do it? By moving to HP ProLiant servers with Intel Xeon 7500 and 5600 series processors, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, IBM DB2 and VMware vSphere 4.0.
The result? Performance is up as much as 40 percent for some applications, and 11 percent overall – all while eliminating 35 racks of servers and reducing power and cooling consumption by 80 percent.
Concello de Santiago in northwest Spain is the government body for the city of Santiago de Compostela. The city is renowned for its medieval architecture. It's a world heritage city.
But the city had a problem. Its servers were showing the signs of old age. It was time to turn to virtualization and new hardware to modernize a technology infrastructure that at times did not work at all.
The results: better uptime, less maintenance and consolidation of its servers.
The Aucsland Group had been growing fast. An energy boom in the Pacific Rim had created new demands for the company and its various operations that included engineering and manufacturing and construction for the oil and gas industries.
As the company grew, it needed to place more emphasis on its IT resources. It needed to expand its server room or move it entirely.
Virtualization presented a better option.
Quebecor World is one of the largest commercial printing companies in the world. The Canadian based company, now owned by Quad/Graphics, decided a few years ago to move all of its servers from Illinois to Montreal, Canada.
Instead of putting the servers on a truck, they created virtual servers and ported them to Montreal.
It worked out so well they decided to further explore new ways they could further leverage a virtual environment.
The results? Server count dropped by 90%.
We take for granted the ease in which we can get water. Turn a handle and the water comes out of the faucet.
But go to any water agency and you will see how complex it can be to manage a water supply.
Tampa Bay Water is a Florida agency that supplies water to nearly 2.5 million people in the Tampa Bay Area--the 19th largest metropolitan area in the United States.
The agency has an extensive computer system for Hydrological Water Modeling. Supporting the new water modeling system became a burden on the agency's enterprise environment. To help matters, they turned to Intel and VMware to help consolidate its servers.
Opus Interactive is a marketing agency based in Portland, Or.
In addition to providing managed hosting services for businesses and individuals, Opus provides services for advertising, marketing and other digital service agencies.
At the heart of its operation is the Intel Xeon processor which powers the servers for the data center. On top of these servers the company uses vMware vSphereTM 4--the industry's first operating system for building the internal cloud.
Simplot Australia initially used VMware virtualization software and Intel hardare to create a test and development environment.
The wholly owned subsidiary of the J R Simplot Company saw the immediate benefits and has not looked back since.
Today, more than 60% of the IT infrastructure at Simplot Australia's corporate office has been virtualized.
The University Hospital Leipzig is Europe's oldest running hospital. For years, the hospital system has been running SAP Human Resources and SAP Business Warehouse.
The hardware running the systems were coming to the end of its life cycle and the company needed a replacement.
The Virginia Community College system had a problem. The IT department had run out of ways to cool its data centers. It was maxed out.
They explored going through the expense of transforming the building where the servers were housed or moving to a new building all together.
Virtualization helped sort things out. They discovered servers that were soaking up power but were doing next to nothing. The results came far faster than expected. The cost savings were almost immediate.
IBM had a credit card processor client with more than 4,700 servers spread across 10 data centers. IBM did an analysis and found that the servers were being underutilized. IBM emploted VMware and Intel technology to create a virtualization platform that consolidated servers and lowered the time and cost of administration.
The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) relocates its data centers to North Carolina. Instead of relocating 250 servers, they leverage the opportunity to create a virtual infrastructure using Intel and VMware technology.
Frederick Memorial converts 80 percent of its data center--nearly 85 servers--onto six VMware ESX hypervisors powered by Intel-based severs.
Southwestern/Great American consolidates storage and saves resources by not having to replace outdated legacy servers.
Gateway Bancorp's bank tellers, loan officers, and other employees rely on a series of financial software applications behind the scenes to better serve customers. In order to achieve maximum uptime for these key applications, Gateway virtualized them using VMware Infrastructure 3 running on Intel-powered hardware.
Welch's was close to outgrowing its data center. Virtualization helped stop server sprawl and save costs.
The EMEA division of OmnicomMediaGroup found itself faced with a classic challenge: they were running out of space and power in their data center.