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Cathleen A. Gagne, Senior Editorial Director
choice on the basis of conserving precious IT budget as well as functionality.
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The Colorado Department of Corrections is another happy Xen customer. It began virtualizing its servers last year without spending a penny. Facing a shortage of power to its data center, the Novell shop decided to take advantage of the Xen capabilities in Novell SUSE Linux. It has since converted 26 physical servers – about half its server farm -- to eight blade servers that run applications such as RIM's BlackBerry Enterprise Server. And it won't stop there. "When we're done is when we've virtualized everything we can," said John Jubic, the end user solutions manager for the department. Jubic said the department opted to go with Novell SUSE Xen based on the strong relationship with its Novell primary support engineer. "I don't think there was anything extremely special about it apart from the service I get from them," he said. That, and the zero-dollar price tag. Under tight IT budget constraints, a $100,000 request for new hardware had been turned down just the year before. "Since we already owned SUSE, there was no cost at all to move to Xen," Jubic said. As an added benefit, the IT department regained a test environment. Before, "we didn't have space to even bring in new hardware," Jubic said, much less test and develop new applications. "We really needed to have someplace to work." Go forth and virtualize
Wary of making the wrong decision, first-time virtualization users sometimes shy away from offerings such as XenServer or Novell SUSE. Conservative by nature, many IT managers want to avoid vendor lock-in with a product that might not pan out in the long run. But experts say that the risk of going with something other than VMware or Hyper-V is low. "Technically, they all hold their own," said Tony Iams, a senior analyst at Ideas International Inc. in Rye Brook, N. Y. They may not feature advanced features such as VMware's memory overcommit, but for day-to-day functions, they have live migration and they support shared storage – key enablers for server consolidation, he added. "At this point, virtualization for consolidation has become a no-brainer," Iams said. "It's squarely within that mainstream segment." Furthermore, the emergence of standards such as the Distributed Management Task Force's Open Virtualization Format makes the risk of choosing the wrong hypervisor very low, Iams said. "If you make the wrong choice, you can always move off later on." With that said, "For short-term issues of server consolidation, if the price is right, I haven't seen any [hypervisor offerings] that fall down." Nor is Microsoft Hyper-V necessarily a better option, despite being bundled with Windows Server 2008 R2, said city of Lenexa's Lawrence. Even though the "Microsoft marketing juggernaut will drive people to Hyper-V, it doesn't even begin to compare with XenServer," he said.
Let us know what you think about the story; email: Alex Barrett, News Director.