Techo Rama

Goulburn Ovens Institute of TAFE in Northern Victoria has streamlined from 16 servers to just two in three weeks and without any down time. All this that looks to be a dream comes courtesy of Virtualization. Virtualization technology enables organizations to consolidate data without disrupting its business and doing so also saves time, money and manpower. Virtualization technology separates the software layer of computing which includes OS and applications from hardware it runs on. Once a system has been virtualized, it can run any number of instances of any operating system. After this each appears to the other as it is having its own hardware. The technology is important because most organizations have to maintain different servers for different applications. Big organizations have web servers, database servers and many others for many different applications. This is an increase in cost and we also require manpower to look after all these systems. On the other hand using Virtualization technology can put all these servers in one or two servers. This reduces the cost and manpower and does not have any adverse effect on the computing capacity. TAFE caters to 17,000 students and 450 staff workers. The country college which has six campuses in north-western Victoria had 45 servers scattered through the network were managed from a data centre in Shepparton. Some of these machines were old and were in need of replacement. The college now settles on Dell’s PowerEdge 6850 servers with Intel Dual-Core processors running version 3.0 of VMware’s enterprise virtualization software. This entire consolidation effort took less than three weeks with no downtime. Now the work done by 16 servers has been consolidated into two virtual servers which provide all the facilities that were there with 16 servers. Virtualization technology is not new, it has been available on Mainframes and UNIX based systems for many years now. The only change is that companies like VMware and Microsoft have extended that capability to the popular x86 microprocessor architecture that is used by chip giants Intel and AMD in desktop computers and low-cost servers. The concept is much easier in high-end machines that run multiple core processors. The credit to get Virtualization in desktop system can be given to VMware. VMware was founded by a husband-wife team in 1998. Today the company has more than 4 million users and 20,000 corporate clients. Australian businesses are rapidly up-taking Virtualization as it can deliver both innovation and cost-reduction in the data centre. Consolidation of servers saves money in server acquisition and maintenance. Another major benefit of Virtualization is easy disaster-recovery, as it is easy to load a backed-up virtual server onto new hardware without affecting other bits and bytes.