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No matter which storage show or conference you attend, you can be guaranteed lots of presentations and peer networking around the topic of virtualization. In my experience, most of these conversations center on the debate over block virtualization: Does it belong in the network or in the array? But attendees at this fall's Storage Networking World (SNW) show in Grapevine, TX, focused squarely on the VMware experience.
John Thomas, IT manager at the Atlanta- based law firm Troutman Sanders, turned to VMware to control costs in his data center and lessen the amount of time needed to deploy servers. "We implemented VMware because with our growth rate, we had an issue with space, power and cooling in the data center," he says. Thomas' SNW presentation, titled "Virtual Verdict," covered backup options in a virtual environment. "The turnaround time to provision a server with VMware is about 15 minutes," he noted.?"Before, it could take weeks to acquire hardware and get a new server in place."
Instead of buying 15 physical servers at $5,000 each, Thomas estimated it would cost $20,000 for hardware and software for a VMware host and another $20,000 for storage allocation. So instead of paying $75,000 for the servers, it would cost $40,000 to virtualize them. At Troutman Sanders, Thomas consolidated 160 physical servers to 120 since installing VMware last spring. He expects to be at 80 physical servers a year from now.
The proliferation of virtual machines on a physical server complicates backup, however. VMware, anticipating this, last year introduced VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) to speed backups with point-in-time snapshots.
Without VCB, "I need agents in each VM box that needs to be backed up," says Rob Rees, systems administrator at ICOS, a Bothell, WA-based biotech firm and a wholly owned subsidiary of Eli Lilly and Company.
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