Credit Suisse plans virtualization a massive scale
32515
(InfoWorld) - With 20,000 servers to manage, financial services powerhouse Credit Suisse had a long list of reasons to consider server virtualization: reducing the number of physical servers to manage, cutting power needs, improving software provisioning time, and deferring expensive datacenter buildouts. But it also needed a clear set of guidelines to determine when to virtualize, plus a clear set of procedures for managing a virtualization initiative. Credit Suisse began by eliminating servers as candidates for virtualization. For example, the company had already created server efficiencies by sharing instances of Web servers on one box and sharing databases on another box -- both time-honored, proven techniques, notes Stephen Hilton, managing director for enterprise server and storage. "Putting a hypervisor there doesn't necessarily help you," he says, because Credit Suisse had already raised utilization rates and reduced hardware needs for those applications. Other sets of servers just didn't make sense for virtualization, Hilton says, including I/O-intensive servers, servers with specialized add-on hardware, and servers whose transactional applications had very tight processing windows, where the overhead of virtualization added milliseconds that would cause timing problems. That still left a large pool of virtualization candidates -- about 10,000 servers, in fact, most running either Windows or Solaris. In general, their utilization was low, particularly those used in development and test environments where, in both cases, the boxes tended to have more horsepower than needed. That low utilization is apparent in Hilton's expectations of how many VMs he will get per physical server: at least a 20:1 ratio for servers in the development environment; 15:1 to 10:1 for the test and disaster recovery environment; and 5:1 in the production application environment. Hilton's team is now in the process of virtualizing these servers, with plans to be done with 5,000 by early 2009. The group has already virtualized 1,000. In crafting Credit Suisse's server virtualization strategy, Hilton decided to take a page from the storage virtualization playbook and conceive of the environment as a shared service, not just as a collection of VMs. "We created a complete hosting platform from which we 'sell' slices of capacity," he says. That meant treating physical servers as parts of a bigger resource pool from which capacity could be pulled as needed. Accomplishing that meant the storage associated to the servers also had to be malleable -- a perfect fit for the datacenter's SAN. But a SAN alone didn't go the whole distance, Hilton notes. He brought in thin provisioning, which let him logically account for physical storage capacity he didn't have yet, so when additional storage was needed, it was added without having to change the logical storage pool, a nontrivial effort. "When you have hundreds of VMs, it would be very painful to the cluster management without thin provisioning," he says. Deploying virtual servers on a SAN brought its own complications. "We learned that the I/O characteristics of a SAN that has a lot of VMs running are very difficult at startup," Hilton notes. When a physical servers starts, a dozen or more virtual servers all start as well, using not only physical I/O within the server blade but also on the SAN. "When you have 50 to 60 VMs on eight [physical] servers, they're chatty," he says. That situation required a change in how the physical servers connected to the SAN and the startup timing of VMs on a host to better distribute those I/O demands. The SAN also needed to be resized and rebalanced for the steeper failover I/O in a virtual-server environment. The issue, Hilton says, is that a dozen server images take a lot of storage and I/O all at once if their physical server fails and they need to be moved. Essentially, there's a price to be paid in the SAN infrastructure to support the higher density of multiple VMs on a physical server. The other deployment strategy Hilton needed to work out involved the ongoing provisioning and maintenance of the virtual servers: "It's so easy to provision a VM, so how do you ensure that an enterprise doesn't create them willy-nilly?" Credit Suisse's solution was to automate the provisioning. All requests go to a central tool that tracks the requests, available resources, and so forth, so IT can track usage easily and be alerted when potentially abusive requests occur, such as multiple VMs requested by the same person or department in a short period. Essentially, the VM and the resources that they reside in are treated as inventory to be managed. The automated system also let Hilton introduce the concept of leasing VMs to developers. "They get it for 30 days, then it disappears. Otherwise, it would live forever, as it did with physical servers. You can't be a box-hugger any more," he says. Virtualization special report Case study: Nationwide Insurance Case study: Purdue University Case study: Stonebridge Bank Case study: Transplace
241948
Consolidate like the big boys Well entrenched in the data centers of the Fortune 100, VMware has decided to go after the little guy. The software maker this week plans to roll out a new server virtualization management bundle aimed at small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs).â¦
213430
(InfoWorld) - Going virtual is becoming a real answer for data center managers, according to a survey of large and small businesses. Fifty-one percent of North American companies are either testing virtualization technology in their data centers or have already deployed it, according to a report released Friday by Forrester Research. Use of virtualization is less in Europe (35 percent either testing or deploying it) and Asia-Pacific (21 percent), but is generally growing nonetheless. Forrester compared results of a 2006 survey to a similar one in 2005 in which 41 percent of companies in North America, 30 percent in Europe and 23 percent in Asia-Pacific were using or testing virtualization. Although the Asia-Pacific number is lower in 2006 than 2005, Forrester notes the survey sample was smaller there than in the other regions. Whether or not they are using virtualization, interest in or even just awareness of virtualization grew in all geographic regions in 2006 from 2005. Virtualization refers to dynamic management of a company's total information technology infrastructure. The most common use of virtualization is in the operation of x86 servers in data centers. Virtualization makes it possible to run multiple software applications and operating systems simultaneously on one physical server. The result is that instead or running at only 15 percent to 20 percent of capacity, when one server runs only one application, servers can run at 80 percent to 90 percent of capacity. Thus, a company could spend less money buying servers. Although virtualization is more likely embraced by large enterprises, awareness of it by SMBsÂ is growing at a faster rate, the survey showed. Awareness of virtualization by Global 2000 large enterprises grew to 92 percent in 2006 from 87 percent in 2005. But awareness by medium-to-large business jumped to 86 percent from 60 percent andÂ to 83 percent from 62 percent by SMBs. Server virtualization software company VMware remains the dominant provider. Fifty-three percent of those surveyed would consider VMware for virtualization, versus just 9 percent for Microsoft's Virtual Server product. Only one respondent mentioned the open-source Xen virtualization software as a choice, while just six mentioned Sun's Solaris operating system, whose virtualization feature is called Containers. EMC, which operates VMware as a subsidiary,Â announced plans this week to launch an initial public offering of VMware stock. Microsoft, which introduced its Virtual Server product in 2004, is expected to launch an updated version later this year. Forrester surveyed 1,267 enterprises with more than 1,000 employees, and 503 SMBs with 100 to 999 employees for its report.
301767
Credit Suisse will fully integrate its  investment bank Credit Suisse First Boston with the rest of its  banking business, the Swiss group said on Tuesday, as it set  ambitious earnings targets for 2007.
585161
Credit Suisse today announced that up to 300 jobs will be lost in an overhaul of its troubled investment banking business. The company said its investment arm - Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB) - would be
273058
A handful of technology companies plan to announce that they are forming a consortium to accelerate utilitylike grid computing in the corporate world.
617401
Switzerland's second-biggest banking group Credit Suisse said it plans to add up to 4,000 employees to double its staff for Asian operations over the next two years.
485142
At VMware's user conference, server vendors lined up to pledge support for a "thin hypervisor" version of the company's virtualization software that can be built directly into systems.
625402
NEW YORKâHitachi Data Systems Inc. unveiled Tuesday embedded virtualization layer technology that can aggregate up to 32 petabytes of internal and external storage into a single virtual storage pool and
360744
Credit Suisse (CSGN.VX: Quote, Profile, Research) will integrate its investment bank Credit Suisse First Boston with its private bank and aims to float its Winterthur
662011
The software company is now looking to the red-hot virtualization market.
139223
Virtualization company hopes to bring on its Apple Mac virtualization expertise software from the desktop to the server market. But do we need another hypervisor?
348434
The company is opening a technology center in France to showcase how mainframes can be used for back-office tasks such as account reconciliation and funds tracking.
545907
Simon Robinson of 451 believes that the market for storage virtualization technologies will undergo a &quot;significant realignment&quot; over the next 18 months.
224452
IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced expanded scalability enhancements to the industry's most powerful virtualization technology z/VM.
477696
Sun announced Tuesday that it is buying Innotek, maker of VirtualBox, virtualization software that may have more value for software developers than datacenter administrators.Steve Wilson, vice president of&#160;Sun&#39;s nascent xVM virtualization line, called the purchase a &quot;huge deal&quot; for xVM and &quot;even Sun as a whole,&quot; on his official blog Tuesday. Terms of the deal to buy the German company, expected to close in Sun&#39;s fiscal third quarter, were not disclosed.&quot;VirtualBox is software designed to allow users to run multiple operating systems on top of whatever OS they currently have installed,&quot; he wrote. &quot;Whether you choose Windows, Mac, Linux, or Solaris as your default desktop of choice, VirtualBox will ride on top of it and allow you to &#39;host&#39; any arbitrary collection of operating system instances. Software developers everywhere are starting to discover this way of operating, and these desktop virtualization solutions are quickly becoming part of the common developer toolkit.&quot;&quot;While there are other applications that provide this capability, VirtualBox is free, open source, and supports a wide range of operating systems,&quot; Wilson added. The software has been downloaded more than 4 million times since it was released roughly one year ago, according to Sun.VirtualBox may sound similar to Sun&#39;s own xVM Server, but the two products are targeted at different markets, Wilson said. xVM Server, announced in November, is a hypervisor that installs on top of the hardware. &quot;It&#39;s a purpose-built software appliance with functionality to enable server consolidation and dynamic IT. ... This is datacenter grade virtualization,&quot; he said.In comparison, VirtualBox is &quot;a software developer&#39;s dream,&quot; he said. &quot;You can easily set up multiple virtual machines to develop and test your multitier or cross platform applications -- all on a single box. ... Where xVM Server is competitive with something like VMware ESX Server, VirtualBox is more like VMware Workstation/Fusion or Parallels Desktop.&quot;The product will continue to be free, and for strategic reasons, according to Wilson. &quot;The developers that build applications have a huge amount of influence on how they&#39;re deployed. We believe that developers using VirtualBox can help guide their friends in the data center towards xVM Server as the preferred deployment engine,&quot; he said.Sun may also look to align VirtualBox with its other developer-oriented assets, such as NetBeans and Glassfish, he said.&quot;Having a virtual lab story -- assuming it works and developers and QA like it -- is good for a developer-friendly company like Sun,&quot; said Michael Cot&#233;, an analyst with Redmonk. &quot;But I&#39;m not familiar with VirtualBox, so I don&#39;t know if it in particular is good or bad.&quot;Programmers who aren&#39;t using virtualization now ought to start, Cot&#233; said. &quot;You&#39;d have to be one of those self-flagellation types to not want virtual labs in your developer tool-chains,&quot; he said. &quot;Maintaining a bunch of physical machines is tedious. If I&#39;m a developer and I have to write software that runs on four different platforms, spread out over however many different versions of Windows, Linux distros, OS X, et cetera, all of those machines add up. And then creating &#39;fresh installs&#39; of them for testing gets worse.&quot;
603166
New initiatives aim to help businesses create server clusters for high-performance computing tasks.