from GCN.com - The agency first tested virtualization of its e-mail system. But based on e-mail volume and system configuration, the information technology team realized that the system wasn’t the best candidate, said Ron Hardin, the department’s CIO. The IT team looked toward mission-critical systems, such as those associated with environmental research, data warehousing and accompanying front-end applications, and the team decided to start there.
After doing an assessment, the team identified about 65 servers that it could virtualize.
The department now runs applications from those machines on seven HP blade servers.
The migration to virtual machines has reduced energy consumption by 30 percent and could lower maintenance and support costs by 40 percent, Hardin estimated.
Future plans are for agency officials to move software-as-a service and service-oriented architecture applications onto the virtual environment.
A place for desktops
Just as all applications might not be suited for server virtualization, desktop virtualization might not be suited for all environments.
Users typically don't notice when their organization virtualizes a server environment, said Jim Smid, data center practice manager at Apptis Technology Solutions (ATS). Users don’t know whether it is virtualized or deployed on a physical server -- it makes no difference to them.
But desktop PC virtualization is a different story.
In such a setup, users have a thin-client monitor, keyboard and small appliance to pull their unique desktop image and applications from a server that resides in a data center. Such an environment makes it easier for administrators to manage and secure the desktop because users basically have a diskless workstation. But mobile employees, for example, who need to work anywhere, anytime might resist such a system.
Yet, during the past year, there has been a push toward desktop virtualization in the government sector, especially in controlled environments, such as training facilities and laboratories, he said.
For example, many military bases across the country have facilities in which they bring in groups of people for training on software or other technologies, he said. IT administrators need to give those machines a baseline configuration that would allow for different environments.
So desktop virtualization is a cost-effective way for administrators to provide customized desktops to users and then refresh them for the next round of people, Smid said.
“There are tools available to very quickly roll out a consistent image to a lot of different folks,” Smid said. That gives them the ability to work independently without needing administrators to deploy physical infrastructure for everyone who receives the training, he said. Military facilities are deploying desktop virtualization solutions from Citrix and VMware for such deployments, he said.
EPA is considering desktop virtualization but only for specialized environments in which employees need access for routine administrative duties and secure information, Galbreath said.
“We’re treading very carefully on that,” she said. “But right now a lot of those folks have two machines” — one for the confidential information, the other for e-mail and Internet connectivity.
“We’re trying to evaluate how we can use desktop virtualization and still ensure the security of keeping the two separate,” she said.
