VMware points users toward utility computing

With its Intel server farm growing relentlessly, news conglomerate Gannett turned to virtual server company VMware to put multiple virtual machines on single physical boxes.

Gannett deployed VMware's ESX Server software earlier this year and began migrating applications from dozens of Intel servers that were running at less than 15% utilization to virtual machines on two four-way systems. Eric Kuzmack, IT architect at Gannett in Silver Spring, Md., says it's too early to tell what kind of utilization rates he will see, but he expects to be able to run between 15 and 25 virtual machines on the four-processor servers.

By deploying ESX Server, Gannett eliminated many of the headaches associated with managing dozens of one- and two-processor servers, but it did little to deal with management issues related to operating systems and applications. That's because with ESX Server, users have to log on to each host server and manage each virtual machine individually.

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With its Intel server farm growing relentlessly, news conglomerate Gannett turned to virtual server company VMware to put multiple virtual machines on single physical boxes.

Gannett deployed VMware's ESX Server software earlier this year and began migrating applications from dozens of Intel servers that were running at less than 15% utilization to virtual machines on two four-way systems. Eric Kuzmack, IT architect at Gannett in Silver Spring, Md., says it's too early to tell what kind of utilization rates he will see, but he expects to be able to run between 15 and 25 virtual machines on the four-processor servers.

By deploying ESX Server, Gannett eliminated many of the headaches associated with managing dozens of one- and two-processor servers, but it did little to deal with management issues related to operating systems and applications. That's because with ESX Server, users have to log on to each host server and manage each virtual machine individually.

That's where VMware's new Virtual Center comes in. Announced in June as Control Center, the software was in beta testing for most of the summer. It is slated to be generally available next week.

Virtual Center provides a single interface for managing virtual machines that run Windows, NetWare or Linux on multiple physical servers. With Virtual Center, users can do things such as provision multiple systems at once by creating configuration templates that can be copied and shared across multiple servers for quick deployment.

In addition, IT administrators can create a virtual pool of resources out of all their servers with Virtual Center and a technology called VMotion, which the company says moves operating applications from one physical server to another without disruption.

Virtual Center and VMotion technology are key parts of the company's focus on virtual infrastructure, an effort to separate software and operating systems from server, storage and network hardware to enable the provisioning of software workloads based on resource demands.

It's an idea that Gannett's Kuzmack says he likes.

"Virtual Center gives us the ability to view the entire farm as a set of processor, memory and disk resources," he says. "When I hit a threshold I can either move my workloads around, add a new a host if I need to or add more disk."

Today, the migration of virtual machines must be done manually, and Kuzmack would like to see Virtual Center let him handle that automatically.

Michael Mullany, vice president of marketing at VMware, says a software developer's kit also is expected to be announced next week will enable that kind of automation by plugging into management tools such as IBM's ThinkDynamics or HP's OpenView.

Another feature of the VMotion technology is that servers can be taken down for maintenance without disruption, Kuzmack says.

Virtual Center also gives him the ability to delegate access rights to virtual machines for different administrators. The management software integrates with Active Directory to let him integrate security into server management, he says.