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Virtualization: Saving The World

Perspectives By Chris Steffen, Kroll Factual Data

Kroll Factual Data has one of the largest deployments of Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 — running on more than 1,600 virtual machines. Although the company has realized tremendous benefits from Virtual Server, it needed to find ways to reduce the 100 or more hours required each week to manage the environment. It evaluated Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager with great success.

Based on the results, Kroll Factual Data expects to cut its managerial load by 25% to 40% when System Center Virtual Machine Manager is fully rolled out. It hopes to increase production-level virtual machines on physical machines by up to 20% when it begins using System Center Virtual Machine Manager in conjunction with the virtualization technologies in the upcoming Windows Server 2008 release.

With virtual machines, there’s an added layer of tasks you must manage over physical machines. For instance, we spent a lot of time manually copying VHD files from one computer to another so that it had the newest version of the OS, releases, etc. And everything had to go from development through quality assurance and testing to production, which is a labor-intensive process.

Unique to a virtual machine environment is that multiple machines run on a single physical host. This aspect is what saves companies on the front end. Less space is needed to house a large number of servers and less time is spent on machine maintenance.

There are a few issues that must be resolved before a VM can operate at full capacity. First, deciding which VM should be located on which physical server can be time consuming. Second, replicating a Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS)–based server to store data must be completed prior to implementation.

Kroll Factual Data created a golden image to help with this. To deploy it, the company had to make a hardened image of IIS and get security updates and other best practices applied into it. By doing this, if someone wanted to make a new copy of IIS, the manually created template was used.

Kroll Factual Data built its own processes to help streamline VM management. It is important to make a checklist of everything you want from a virtual machine environment manager to help in deciding the best system for your needs. After comparing our list to what the Virtual Server offered we found that it would be an ideal fit for our company.

There are several requirements to consider when evaluating a server virtualization product. One is cost, the other is flexibility, and lastly manageability or ease of use.

These factors will depend on the type of system you are considering and the size of the company. A few other points to consider are compatibility and reliability. Each of these are valid reasons to choose one virtualization product over another.

In my evaluation, each of these requirements were answered by the Microsoft virtualization solution. I am not going to deep dive into a sales pitch here on the benefits of Virtual Server over any of the other solutions, but I did want to address a specific concern that I have heard while attending several conferences in which industry analysts have said that Microsoft’s virtualization products are not ready for enterprise production environments.

Kroll Factual Data has been using Microsoft Virtual Server in our production environment for nearly five years.

The company tested and implemented every subsequent version ever since and is currently able to run 300,000 business transactions per day in this environment, and the flexibility afforded to us by having an 85% virtualized data center allows us to deploy additional capacity on demand almost instantly.

When we started down the virtualization path, some virtualization solutions offered many advantages over Microsoft, specifically in their management tools.

Virtual Machine Manager, and the system improvements, made this year, makes the Microsoft virtualization management solution the most practical system for our needs.

At Kroll Factual Data, we have had Hyper-V in our production environment now for months and migrated the existing Virtual Server 2005R2 VMs to Hyper-V hosts as fast as our IT team could handle the workload.

It has been stable, the technical support has been more than responsive, and we are seeing about a 20% increase in resource utilization over Virtual Server 2005 R2.

Based on Kroll Factual Data’s use of virtualization, it has provided the most cost-effective, reliable and easy-to-manage solution that we have encountered to date, and through continued use we expect to save up to 90% in utility and maintenance costs.

At Kroll Factual Data, we’ve done a lot of work with virtualization and while flexibility and cost savings were major considerations for initiating our virtualization efforts here, some of the green benefits we’ve experienced through using virtualization technologies have been notable as well.

The most simple and obvious benefit of virtualization is server consolidation and utilization. For the most part, stand alone servers do not utilize anything near 100% of their resources. Virtualization is a great technology for enabling you to move and combine stand alone servers onto on a single Hyper-V host.

Ultimately your Hyper-V host configuration will determine the number of Virtual Machines that you can run, but Kroll Factual Data is currently running about 30 VMs on a single, beefy Hyper-V host.

Today, we at Kroll Factual Data are running about 650 VMs on 22 Hyper-V hosts, which completely makes up our production environment, with each of our VM hosts running at about 90% utilization.

From a numbers perspective, if you figure that a one-unit rackmount standalone server uses about 10,000 kWh annually, it would take approximately 6,500,000 kWh to run our entire production environment annually on standalone servers Using Hyper-V virtualization, we are able to reduce our power consumption to about 700,000 kWh per year, for a savings of nearly 90%.

And remember, this is only a reflection of computer hardware operating costs and does not include the additional “green” savings that we get from reduced cooling, data center real estate, and computer hardware purchase and maintenance.

Kroll Factual Data’s commitment to energy awareness extends beyond the data center. The company campus located here in Loveland, Colo., is run entirely on renewable, wind powered energy.

Kroll Factual Data is serious about environmental stewardship and taking responsibility for our impact on the environment in which we do business.

As a technology company, virtualization is a critical component in utilizing technology in an environmentally friendly way. I think that’s important.

For Kroll Factual Data, going “green” was not only the right thing for our company, virtualization also made it the most cost effective and flexible technology solution.

Chris Steffen is principal technical architect for Kroll Factual Data, based in Loveland, Colo. He came to Factual Data Corp. in 1997 as the corporate system administrator. He has held numerous positions within the company, and helped Factual Data through their IPO and acquisitions. After being acquired by Kroll, Mr. Steffen has served Kroll Factual Data as the network operations center manager and the manager of information security and compliance. Kroll Factual Data specializes in providing a suite of services that enable lenders and other clients to evaluate risk accurately.