ITS News

Vanderbilt Information Technology Services (ITS) is maximizing its data center space, containing energy costs, and increasing server availability by using Virtual Machines (VMs).

A virtual machine is segmented by software to act as a standalone machine. Several virtual machines reside on one physical server. Instead of one O/S partition, a server running VM technology can have multiple “virtual” O/S partitions on one physical machine.

This technology, known as “virtualization,” has several immediate benefits. Data Center space is maximized. Energy savings result because several virtual machines operate on one physical server. Additionally, if a physical server fails, the software can immediately pull data from a Storage Area Network (SAN) and bring the affected VMs up on another physical server. This is possible through VMotion technology.

Recently a server in the ITS Data Center running VMs failed. However, because of the redundancy provided by the VM software, affected VMs were moved to another physical server without service interruption. End users in four major sectors of Vanderbilt were spared the service interruption they would have experienced without VMs.

Currently the ITS data center has over 150 VMs running on 14 physical servers. Of those, approximately 115 are owned by ITS. Approximately 35% of the data center, outside of the High Performance Computing Cluster, is now virtual.

VMs are “co-located” in the data center. Under co-location, ITS manages the hardware and the end user manages the VM, installing a supported operating system and applications.

Vanderbilt departments interested in co-locating a virtual machine can contact their ITS Service Delivery Manager for details and costs.

For more information, see the ITS virtual machine webpage.

For more information information about virtualization, view the 2-1/2 minute InfoWorld video explaining the three types of server virtualization and their benefits.