Moreover, to meet the rising demand, vendors such as Citrix Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and VMware are pushing virtual infrastructures or solutions that encompass the various flavors of virtualization.
Server virtualization yields results
Virtualization can make a single physical resource — such as a server, operating system or storage device — appear to function as multiple resources. Or it can make multiple physical devices appear as a single resource.
Before DISA could move virtual machines to its on-demand computing model, it had to tackle server sprawl, power consumption and, most of all, the underutilization of its infrastructure.
As a service provider to the military services and DOD agencies, DISA works with its customers on application development and any type of virtualization at their own facilities.
“Each customer comes with their own requirements, and we work with them on an individual basis," Rivera said. "And sometimes they come with their own design."
Underutilization of resources is common in data centers. On average, if an Intel-based server that runs Microsoft Windows — known as a Wintel machine — is not virtualized, it is probably running at about 7 percent utilization, and that’s a liberal estimate, Rivera said.
So DISA must convince its customers that it makes sense to move to virtualized servers to a common platform. To save money, the agency has standardized its infrastructure for Wintel and Linux servers on VMware’s ESXi virtualization platform, Rivera said.
Several years ago, DISA adopted capacity-on-demand contracts with original equipment manufacturers. The agency buys capacity as a utility and only pays for what it uses. Hewlett-Packard provides DISA's Windows and Linux environments, in addition to a virtualization solution on top of that capacity-on-demand contract, he said.
VMware ESXi users can quickly create virtual machines through a menu-driven start-up and automatic configurations. It lets operations managers create virtual machines or import a virtual appliance with direct integration between VMware ESXi and the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace.
In the Unix environment, DISA is creating virtualization with Sun Microsystems’ Logical Domains, which partitions workloads on one physical server and HP’s virtual server environment for HP-UX systems.
