Microsoft UK Public Sector - Using Software - Virtualisation: an easy win

IT departments are in the front line of the war on wasted money. They need to demonstrate efficiency in their own ranks, whilst helping to drive costs down throughout their organisations. It’s a high-profile position to be in, so every new weapon in the IT manager’s cost-cutting armoury is welcome. Kim Thomas investigates one of the most effective: virtualisation.

Alastair Darling’s announcement in the pre-budget report that the public sector would have to make an additional £5bn in efficiency savings by 2011 was not greeted with universal enthusiasm. Many of those already struggling to meet existing efficiency savings of £30bn understandably felt that the new target was a belt-tightening measure too far.

Inevitably, organisations will turn to the IT department to make efficiency savings with minimal disruption to services. So how should IT respond?

One of the easiest, and most effective, ways of saving money is to implement a programme of server virtualisation. If you have been delaying virtualization because of the amount of work involved, now is the time to reconsider, says Clive Longbottom, service director at analyst firm Quocirca: “Virtualisation is an investment – the rapid payback is phenomenal. If you possibly can, invest in virtualization within your data centres because of the savings you will gain on maintenance, on energy into the data centre, and in the real estate in the data centre.”

Data centres are hugely inefficient users of energy. A traditional server can run only one operating system, and it typically operates at only 10 percent of its capacity - while still consuming large amounts of energy. Longbottom explains: “If a server has a 70 watt CPU, and you’re only using 10 percent of it, it’s probably still using about 55 watts.”

Not only is the server wasting energy, but the additional cost of cooling the server is about four times the cost of running it. “You’re running at 10% utilisation, but paying for the best part of 100% of the server, plus four times that in peripheral costs as well,” says Longbottom. “It’s unsustainable.” That’s a cost to the environment and also a major hit to the IT budget.

Virtualisation, however, enables one physical server to run different operating systems, and thus behave like several virtual servers. Instead of running at 10% of capacity, the physical server works at 50% or more of its capacity. Four out of five servers in the data centre can be switched off, saving both the running costs of those servers and the cost of cooling them. Virtualization also postpones the necessity of having to find a bigger data centre to house servers: as usage grows, you can simply switch unused servers back on.

For Perth and Kinross Council, the return on investment of implementing server virtualisation using Microsoft’s Hyper-V technology has been rapid. Having spent £50,000 on its virtualization programme, it no longer needs to spend £150,000 on new servers, representing a saving of £100,000 in the first year alone.

The expected energy savings are similarly dramatic: the council will use 350,000 kilowatt hours fewer of electricity a year, which translates into an annual cost saving of £26,000. Eventually, it plans to reduce its 111 physical servers to 17 virtualized servers.

Slough Borough Council also faced the problem of spiralling server costs. Each year, it was buying 20 new servers, as more and more applications and e-government initiatives were implemented. Data centre space was running out, and there was pressure to reduce its carbon footprint.

After enrolling in the Microsoft Virtualisation Rapid Deployment Programme, Slough deployed Hyper-V on one host server, creating five virtual servers running Windows Server 2003. It also deployed Hyper-V on a blade farm of 10 servers, and estimates that it will eventually achieve a consolidation ratio of 23:1. “Virtualization came at the right time for us,” says Colin Power, PC and network team leader at Slough. “It has allowed us to consolidate physical servers and to free up data centre space and electrical capacity needed for new equipment and applications.”

Costs were low for both Slough and Perth and Kinross, because Windows Server 2008 comes with Hyper-V as an integral part of the operating system. To make it easier for customers to move to a virtualised environment, Microsoft has simplified its licensing, waiving its previous 90-day reassignment rule, so that customers can reassign licences from one server to another within a server farm as often as they need.

As James O’Neill, IT Pro evangelist at Microsoft, points out, many of the normal costs associated with moving to virtualisation don’t apply for Microsoft customers. “What differentiates Hyper-V is that it’s just part of Windows,” he says. “From a cost point of view, local councils have probably got the necessary licences to run Hyper-V already. If you’ve got support in place, you don’t have to enter into another support contract to manage the virtualization stack, and if you’re sending people to be trained on the operating system, they’re coming back trained on virtualization as well.”

The biggest challenge comes after implementation, says O’Neill, because creating a virtual server is so easy that an organisation can quickly find the number of servers proliferate: “When you buy physical boxes, someone has to sign the purchase order and that slows down the rate at which you can get them installed. With virtualisation, you can just run a script, and hey presto, you’ve got 10 new virtual machines.” There are apocryphal tales of ‘orphaned’ virtual servers falling off the IT team’s radar.

Both Slough and Perth and Kinross are addressing this by using System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, which makes it possible to see, from a single screen, how many virtualized servers there are, how they are being used, and which ones are likely to be overloaded. This not only helps manage the virtual server estate, but helps highlight load and bandwidth challenges, and predict usage demands well into the future.

Even if you are hesitating about implementing a full virtualisation programme, there is no reason to delay starting, says O’Neill: “The main worry people have is whether a particular workload runs in a virtualised environment satisfactorily or not. You can spot the easy ones quite quickly.” While some workloads may take months to switch to a virtualized environment, others may take only 10 days.

Longbottom agrees: “There is no point in not doing it now. As you move forwards, move workloads from physical machines onto virtual machines, and it will become self-sustaining and self-funding.” Don’t linger over the decision to virtualize, he adds: “It’s getting to the point now where it should be a no-brainer.”

Slough Borough Council Case Study:http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization/casestudy-sloughborough.mspx

Perth and Kinross Council case study: http://www.microsoft.com/industry/publicsector/partnersolutionmarketplace/global/CaseStudyDetail.aspx?casestudyid=4000003241

• Read a short article about virtualisation in the public sector

Kim Thomas is a freelance journalist, who specialises in writing about technology, business and education. Her clients include the Financial Times, the Economist Intelligence Unit and The Guardian as well as a number of B2B publications.