What do you do if your organisation has limited space for a data centre, your applications are increasing, and you have a new ERP – all this when your organisation is diversifying at a fast pace?

You Virtualise.
This is exactly what S.R Balasubramanian, Executive Vice President, Information Technology and corporate development of Godfrey Phillips has done. When he joined the organisation in 2007, he encountered a new ERP system in Oracle ERP, ageing servers and an ever-increasing demand for new servers.

The company also had more than 800 desktops, or nodes, on the network. All these desktops use e-mail with more than 500 desktops using ERP and other applications.

Balasubramanian says that they had 30 servers to start with, but the demand slowly grew and reached close to 80 servers. “We could see the pattern two years ago,” says Balasubramanian, “the number of servers was just increasing.”

“We decided that virtualisation was the way forward,” says Balasubramanian. Having had experience in implementing virtualisation at his previous organisation, Balasubramanian was confdent he could pull it off at Godfrey Phillips too.

The implementation of ERP was what set the scene for virtualisation. The organisation had decided to implement Oracle ERP with Real Application Structure (RAC). This requires mirroring of database servers in failsafe mode. Though a good solution, it increases the requirements for servers. Other server demands included application servers, database servers, production servers, proxy servers and domain servers. All or some of these were needed in three different modes – development, testing and production.

The original network was a combination of blade and tower servers. Though we could add some blades in the existing chassis, there was not enough space to account for the expansion plans and ERP implementation. “Not only would we have run out of space in the blade chassis, but also the space at the data centre would have been inadequate. So we had to think of another solution,” says Balasubramanian.

The frst step was creating notes on the requirements. Though at the start it looked like a big investment for Godfrey Phillips, the technology team was able to justify their choice with conviction. They simply compared the projected server expenditure with and without virtualisation. While doing the ROI, a simple cost comparison was enough to tip the argument in favour of the virtualisation exercise. “We said look, we cannot give you an ROI, it is diffcult in such a case; but, if you do not invest in this technology, we would end up investing a lot more in new servers,” says Balasubramanian.

Confusion galore
For virtualising their servers, the company had two options: VMware and Microsoft. They decided on VMware mainly because it provided support for a range of platforms. “We had an option of using either VMware or Microsoft. We chose VMware because it was more open,” says Balasubramanian. The company  uses both Microsoft as well as Linux operating systems.

After deciding on VMware, the next step was buying servers that could be virtualised. “We bought new blades that were quad core and had two quad core CPUs in every blade,” says Balasubramanian. By using virtualisation on these new servers the company was able to divide these servers into many servers. “Each server was converted into eight or more servers,” says Balasubramanian.

The implementation was not without challenges, though. A lack of standards and differences in the virtualisation platforms of different vendors complicated the picture. “When we decided to virtualise servers running Microsoft Exchange our partner said that they would not be able to support it,” says Rajesh Bawa, Senior manager, IT operations and infrastructures, Godfrey Phillips. Microsoft technicians  told Bawa that they could virtualise the Exchange server using Hyper V, a Microsoft product, but with VMware they were not very sure.

Nevertheless, the company decided to go ahead and virtualise their Exchange servers on VMware. “We have virtualised the Exchange machines and we have been stable for the last one and a half years,” says Bawa.

The company faced a similar predicament during talks with Oracle. “Oracle offcials said that their applications would work on the Oracle virtualisation platform, but they couldn't make any guarantees about it running on VMware,” says Balasubramanian.

Although Balasubramanian and his team have taken some risks, they have made sure they have hedged their bets. “With Oracle, for instance, we have decided that we will virtualise it on the development platform but not on the production platform,” says Balasubramanian.

The development platform has been chosen because it gives the company a good test environment to check if the solution works as desired. Oracle had not committed itself to to supporting the team at Godfrey Phillips, so they (the team) knew that they were on their own. Production systems were left out of the virtualisation initiative as the company could just not afford a disruption there.

Benefits
By and large, the virtualisation exercise achieved the desired objectives.

Firstly, the size requirements of new servers at Godfrey Phillips were reduced drastically. Moreover, the company did not have to add new racks in the data centre, nor did they have to look at expanding the data centre. Another important impact was the reduced electricity costs due to lower power consumption on account of the decrease in the number of servers in the data centre.

The biggest monetary gains resulted from the decrease in capital expenditure required in buying new servers. “We have 80 servers virtualised on 36 physical servers. A rough estimate is that we have been able to save close to Rs. 5 million in server costs alone,” says Bawa.

Other than the cost savings, another important beneft was manageability. “Patch management, roll backs and similar issues are much easier to manage,” says Balasubramanian.

It is also easy for the technology team to have services and servers available on demand. For instance, some days back, one of the teams in the organisation needed a new set of servers for a new application. Though the IT team did not have the whole set that was required, they were able to allocate a few servers extremely quickly even as new servers were being ordered for the application.

“Event though it was a new assignment, we were able to start with a couple of servers. By the time the project moved forward, the required number of servers arrived,” says Balasubramanian.

Just as in the case of requirements for new applications, there were surges in demand for applications that were already deployed. This surge was diffcult to handle when the company was running physical servers, but the situation changed in the virtualised environment.“For instance, during month-end there is a sudden pressure on ERP, so we increase allocation for it and reduce allocation for an application like BI which places no special demand during that period,” says Balasubramanian.

The way forward
The virtualisation exercise may have been successful but it is not the end of the road for Balasubramanian and his team. The team is planning in advance to take steps to ensure that it can gracefully handle the increasing load on its systems.

The team is currently evaluating Disaster Recovery solutions. Though they are using VMotion – which is a VMware product that allows virtual machines to be moved from one physical machine to another without much disruption – the need for a proper disaster recovery solution is being felt.

The team is also looking at resource management solutions. As the pressure on their virtualised platform grows, the IT team would need to have a good solution that gives them a dashboard to manage all their resources and dynamically allocate them where they are needed the most at any particular time.

Balasubramanian says that implementing virtualisation has been a challenging exercise; however, the benefts of fexibility and cost savings clearly outweigh the negative aspects.

“Virtualisation is a journey; going forward we will extend its deployment to cover more applications,” says Balasubramanian.