Virtualization – A Required Component of Green IT Initiatives

F. D. “Dito” Guerra

Manager, VMware Texas Government & Education Team

August 11, 2008

Agenda

•Your Texas Government/Education (SLED) VMware Team

•Honored Guests & Panel Members

•Defining Green IT and Virtualization

•Why Virtualization is a Required Component of Green IT Initiatives

•How Texas SLED Customers Use Virtualization Products Today

•Required Functionality to Accomplish Green IT Objectives

•Customer Panel – Employees Retirement System of Texas CIO/Team

•Justifying Green IT Projects - Assess Utilization and Plan

Your Texas Government/Education VMware Team

Dito Guerra - Manager, VMware Texas Government Team

Randy Covey– Sr. Systems Engineer, VMware Texas Government Team

Honored Guest Panel Members

Mel Mireles - Chief Information Officer, The Employees Retirement System of Texas (ERS)

Eric Obermier - Technology Operations Manager, The Employees Retirement System of Texas (ERS)

Presentation Goals

This session will describe the significant reduction in

power, cooling, space and computing resources

required to run IT infrastructure which results when

shared services are offered from a virtualized

server/desktop environment.

Four Goals for Today – It’s All About You

1. Describe how Virtualization makes it possible to realize the benefits of green IT initiatives.

2. Provide you a real world example of an important Texas Agency and specifics on how they benefited by virtualizing.

3. Facilitate knowledge sharing with your Texas Government/Education Peers to minimize your risk and maximize realized benefits.

4. Describe how you can assess your environment for virtualization opportunities and plan/execute Green IT Initiatives.

Defining Green IT

•According to “The Green Grid”:

The Green Grid is a global consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency and minimizing material waste in data centers and business computing ecosystems. 

•Analysts:

Gartner – “Limits on Power Availability will Affect 70% of all Organizations Over the Next 5 Years”

Defining Green IT

Why Initiate Green IT Projects:

• Reduce IT power consumption ( Save $$ quickly, rebates such as Austin Energy, Pacific Gas & Electric)

• Reduce material resource consumption in IT (e-waste)

• Reduce cost to cool data centers/facilities

• Eliminate dense/inefficient data centers • Better cooling reduces failures• Avoid costs to upgrade infrastructure to meet

inefficient power use (such as needing to buy new circuits to support power consumption increase)

Defining Green IT

Why Initiate Green IT Projects:

• Comply with anticipated legislation/regulations – e-waste disposal, carbon regulations, California CO2 controlled by 2020

• Preserve environment by eliminating material waste

• Increase IT contribution to organization wide Green Initiatives ( Image & Perception as well)

• Lower Costs

Defining Virtualization

Single OS image per machine Software and hardware tightly coupled Running multiple applications on same

machine often creates conflict Underutilized, inflexible, costly

infrastructure

Break dependencies between OS and hardware

Manage OS and application as single unit by encapsulating them into VMs

1 physical server can host many VMs VM’s are hardware-independent

With Virtualization:Without Virtualization:

Defining Virtualization

Why Initiate Virtualization Projects:

• Reduce power consumption

• Improve data center cooling ( minimize failures)

• Save Space

• Get high availability and load balancing (better utilization) which are inherent to virtualized environments

• Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of computing assets

• Do more with less

Green IT Objectives:• Reduce IT material consumption

• Lower Costs

• Reduce IT power consumption

• Reduce cost to cool data centers/facilities

• Comply with anticipated legislation/regulations

Results of Virtualizing: • Reduced # of physical servers required to

deliver same workloads

• Reduced cost to administer servers Infra.

• Reduced power consumption - fewer servers require less power

• Lowered data center temperature

• Fewer servers to eol at refresh in future

• New free floor space in data center

Why Virtualization is a Required Component of Green IT

Virtualization Makes Green IT Possible!!

How Texas SLED Use Virtualization Products Today

•Server Consolidation and Containment – Eliminate server sprawl by deploying systems into virtual machines

Green Objectives Met – reduced material and energy Consumption, e-waste, cost to cool, Rag. compliance (e-waste/Carbon)

•Infrastructure Provisioning – Reduce the time for provisioning servers/desktops to minutes

Green Objectives Met - reduced material and energy Consumption, e-waste, cost to cool, Rag compliance (e-waste/Carbon)

•Business Continuity – Reduce the cost and complexity of business continuity by encapsulating entire systems files that can be replicated and restored onto any target server (HA)

Green Objectives Met – reduced energy consumption

Enterprise Desktop Virtualization – Secure unmanaged PCs. Alternatively, provide standardized enterprise desktop environments hosted on servers.

Green Objectives Met - reduced material and energy Consumption, e-waste, cost to cool, Rag compliance (e-waste/Carbon)

How Texas SLED Use Virtualization Products Today

•A Hypervisor

•Advanced Information Management tools:

• Live migration of virtual machines

• Ability to intelligently balance workloads

• Ability to automatically restart virtual machines • if a physical server fails

•Power Management Places unused servers in standby mode

Brings servers back online automatically as workload needs increase

Required Functionality to Meet Green IT Objectives

A Hypervisor alone is not enough!!

Virtualization - In Depth Case Study on ERS

August 11, 2008

•Employees Retirement System of Texas

Employee Retirement System of Texas

Who they are & What they Do:

The Employees Retirement System of Texas (ERS) is a Texas State Government agency that was created in 1947 to oversee retirement benefits for State of Texas employees. ERS manages a $26 billion dollar investment fund to provide these benefits to it’s members. In addition to retirement benefits, ERS now administers the Texas Employees Group Benefits Program (GBP), TexFlex and Texa$aver programs. The GBP is the group insurance plan (health, dental, life and disability).

Honored Guest Panel Members from ERS:

Mel Mireles - Chief Information Office The Employees Retirement System of Texas (ERS)

Eric Obermier - Technology Operations Manager, The Employees Retirement System of Texas (ERS)

Employee Retirement System of Texas

Environment Pre-Vmware:

• 103 X86 servers (and demand for 25% growth)• Core applications include Peoplesoft (multiple), Email (converting to

Exchange 2007 currently), Novell File and Print Services, Investment Applications for Portfolio mgmt

• Significant server sprawl – no empty racks, space problems, heat issues

• X86 servers consumed approximately 134 kwh

Primary Motivations to Virtualize:

• Manageability (allow for off site mgmt etc..)• To Compress time to provision machines• Need for DR and high availability functionality• To cut costs and to get greater value out of IT dollars spent

ERS- Before and After VMware Virtualization

Before Virtualization:

• 103 x86 servers in data center

• No SAN (for x86 servers)

• Energy consumed by x86 servers was approximately 134kwh

• One day to provision a physical server

• No HA

After Virtualizing with VMware: • Only 30 physical x86 servers, 6 ESX hosts

(30:1 compression ratio, 150 VMs running)

• 54% reduction in server infrastructure costs

• Energy consumed by X86 servers REDUCED by 61%

• 164 Ft2 new/available data center floor space

• Ambient temperature reduced by 7

• VMware First Policy

• 30 minutes to provision a VM

• DR, HA, DRS functionality built in

Justifying Green IT Projects- Assess Utilization & Plan

•Assessing Utilization and Planning :• Gather Server and Application Asset Information

• Run tools in your environment to gather server utilization metrics

• Create virtualization plan - order of operations, priorities etc.

• On line ROI Calculator on virtual environment conveys savings, and payback period of Green IT initiatives

Summary

• Virtualization Enables Green IT Projects

• Justify Green IT Projects by:

• Assess your environment for Virtualization Opportunities (studies)

• Calculate ROI using Calculators on line• Plan your transition to a virtual environment

Contact - Dito Guerra, Dito@VMware.com,

512-680-9477