Virtualization tools provide net savings to tennis tour
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IBM uses virtualization to cut the costs of running the U.S. Open Web site for the U.S. Tennis Association.
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VMware, a maker of software that enables computers to run multiple operating systems simultaneously, is working on a new product to make it secure for corporations to open their networks to contractors or telecommuters.
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(InfoWorld) - While many IT shops see virtualization as a question of adopting EMC's VMware on servers running Windows or Linux, Nationwide Insurance has adopted the technology for both x86-based and mainframe-hosted servers. After all, notes Buzz Woeckener, the company's zLinux/Unix server manager, virtualization was invented for mainframes. On the x86 server side, Nationwide reached 5,000 servers two years ago, running all sorts of departmental applications, notes Scott Miggo, vice president of technology solutions. "We were growing at a steady pace, so we wanted to control the server space and the costs for new development," he says. "A lot of our servers had only a 10 percent utilization rate," he notes, wasting much of the server capacity. Roughly half are production application servers and half are test-and-development servers. Today, there are 3,500 physical servers in operation but still 5,000 instances under management. The VMware servers typically host a dozen instances per physical server. "We assume every new server or application can be virtualized," Miggo says. He expects to have more than 1,000 virtual servers running on 89 physical servers by 2009. His team works to tweak I/O requirements or settings for virtual servers that may have trouble supporting I/O needs in their default state, and it works with vendors to support VMs where possible, before falling back to dedicated servers. Lotus Notes and database applications are examples of where the I/O requirements make virtualization not an option. Although it's easier to deploy servers in a virtual environment by using predefined images, "our staffing has stayed pretty much the same," Miggo says, because the same number of servers must still be monitored. The slight reduction in management overhead is offset by the need for VMware experts to manage the VMware environment, in addition to the server instances. And Nationwide learned the hard way that it needs to monitor both its virtual and physical servers, then correlate the two to identify potential trouble spots, Miggo says. Not doing so can make diagnosis hard, since a VM issue may be caused by a physical issue that a server monitor application running in only the VM won't detect. There's also more overhead needed for Miggo's shared-services group to coordinate all users (such as developers and application managers) of a physical server, as changes to the physical server could affect them all -- and because adjustments to one VM's application mix could affect I/O and other physical server performance characteristics. "We now have to coordinate with 12 users," Miggo says. "People were used to having their own boxes and doing their own thing. Now they're more tightly controlled, which they don't like. But they have to follow control processes like code management and release management since what they do could affect others," he notes. The use of EMC's VMotion software to load-balance and failover VMs across physical servers might reduce management, but the insurer is still exploring that technology. One barrier: Its requirement that all server instances run on physical servers with the same CPU family, requiring a consistent server pool to be in place. Nationwide runs its Web servers in a zLinux environment on IBM zSeries mainframes, supporting 650 guest operating systems (VMs) today, with space for another 650 before additional hardware frames would be needed. Often, using z/VM to support the virtualized Web servers requires a different strategy than using VMware to support virtualized Windows servers, Woeckener notes. For example, you might add memory, CPUs, or network cards to increase I/O on a VMware server. On a zSeries, the CPUs just handle executables, offloading physical I/O (such as network bandwidth and resource scheduling) to dedicated processors, so you don't need to worry about performance-sapping overhead incurred by server resource management. Another difference: Increasing heap size can improve performance in a Windows application but also degrade it in a zLinux application, Woeckener says. That's because Linux steals resources wherever it can find them, so any extra heap space is used by Linux for its own purposes, degrading application performance. When the heap size is reduced, Linux seeks resources elsewhere, giving the full heap to the application and improving performance. In both the VMware and z/VM environments, the ease of deploying new virtual servers has led Nationwide to align demand with real needs, as well as to encourage the use of VMs rather than physical servers. Virtual Windows servers cost a requestor $750 per month versus $2,000 per month for a physical server. And zLinux VMs add a per-MIP rate for weekday usage exceeding 15 MIPs. This overage charge steers batch processing to overnight and weekend periods, when overall demand is less, and forces developers of applications in use during the business day to optimize for performance, saving datacenter resources at the same time. Virtualization special report Case study: Credit Suisse Case study: Purdue University Case study: Stonebridge Bank Case study: Transplace
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Read this white paper featuring VMware and LeftHand to learn about the true costs of storage and server sprawl, proven approaches to virtualization, and methods to maximize ROI using virtual machines on iSCSI SANs.
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Software that lets computers split into virtual machines will create more powerful subdivisions.
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One part math, two parts physics, customization promises to transform an everyday racket into the perfect tennis machine.
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VMware tests a desktop virtualization program that runs on a USB drive.
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VMware's Pocket ACE is designed for mobile workers who may not have a laptop with them in the field but who could use an available desktop computer to run virtualization software.
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SEPTEMBER 20, 2004  - VMware Inc. released today a virtualization tool for PCs it says will cut hardware and maintenance costs for users such as independent contractors that support third parties on their networks.
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Last week, I spoke with VMware Vice President of Marketing Michael Mullany about VMware ACE, a fascinating solution that simplifies and secures the deployment of software environments to mobile workers, contractors, and telecommuters.
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The latest version of the server includes built-in virtualization technology.
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Virtualised SAN and NAS bid for your storage grid
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Some attendees at Computerworlds Storage Networking World conference are combining their use of backup software and deduplication tehnology with virtual systems in an effort to manage ever-increasing data stores.
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The trials and tribulations of application dependency in a virtualized, hosted world.
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The software company is now looking to the red-hot virtualization market.
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Technology company GigaBeam has come up with an alternative to the bottleneck that bedevils businesses everywhere.
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The promise of desktop virtualization technology is to centralize applications at the datacenter to make them easier to manage and provision -- stretching hardware resources and keeping nagging software conflicts to a minimum in the bargain.