 "Virtualisation Leads To Centralised Server Mgmt For Patni")
As the shadow of the recession fades, companies are getting busy with planning their IT budgets for the next year. Taking tips from the lessons learned during the downturn, the focus of every company revolves around minimising cost and maximising productivity. Keeping the same focus in mind, Patni Computer Systems has deployed a virtualisation solution from VMware for virtualising its server infrastructure and replacing the physical servers at the company’s data centres.
Why Virtualisation?
According to a Frost & Sullivan report, server virtualisation is the forerunner in the adoption of virtualisation, primarily because of the visible benefits of consolidation, reduced operating expenditure, and limited impact on user operations. In CY2008, 24.5 percent of the servers sold were virtualisation-enabled.
For Patni, the need for virtualisation was two-fold in nature. Firstly, being a software development company, every customer project needed to be tested using a special development environment. This need was dynamic and would change with every project. Secondly, Patni had a mammoth server infrastructure that was disparate in nature and thereby, needed to be rationalised and managed better. So the company deployed VMware Infrastructure 3, featuring ESX 3.5, Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), VMotion, High Availability and vCenter Server.
“Being a front runner in the virtualisation space, VMware was well suited to address the needs of a large enterprise like ours. Hence, there was little need for an active evaluation process for making this decision,” says Satish Joshi, Executive Vice President, Patni.
Status before the Deployment
Previously, Patni had multiple servers assigned to project managers across the organisation for specific projects. These servers became redundant after the completion of the project. There was no single ownership, which made it difficult for the IT infrastructure management team to execute patches and anti-virus management.
Further, it was a highly siloed environment with every service running on a separate hardware server. As a result, there were diverse hardware platforms, including servers and workstations, as well as diverse software platforms spread across the company that were acquired as and when required.
Joshi explains, “Whenever there was a new requirement, an old server could not be configured and re-assigned as there was no sense of accountability or ownership. The consequence was an ill balanced usage of capacity, a delay in responding to changing requirements and over-provisioning of computing equipment.” So the need of the hour was a virtualisation solution that would centralise control to ease server management.
Challenges on the Way
During the implementation of the virtualisation solution, Patni did not face any application compatibility issues as advance tests were done to ensure a seamless roll-out. However, the company faced some problems at the management level. “Traditionally, our project managers were used to visually possessing a server that was allocated to them for development or testing, while in case of virtualisation its very nature meant there was no tangible visibility. This idea was met with some resistance from project managers, but soon they realised that the allocated virtual servers provided the same performance and functionality,” says Joshi.
The roll-out was carried out in a phased manner. The process started with an internal testing exercise. The first phase was that of server consolidation. The modules comprised virtualising non-critical servers for the development environment and finally moving on to the production servers. The company replaced non-critical internal servers, moving them from single boxes and then implemented ESX.
A thorough internal testing and a systematic, step-by-step mapping ensured that any downtime was anticipated and measures were put in place to tackle it. The entire migration exercise took three to four months. This was followed by other features such as Distributed Resource Scheduler and Power Management.
What has been achieved?
VMware virtualisation solution has provided Patni with centralised control to ease server management allowing flexibility in allocation of virtual machines. This has resulted in high availability, reduced infrastructure downtime, and faster back-up and restoration times. It also allows easy migration from a 32-bit to a 64-bit environment.
The company has achieved a server consolidation ratio of 12:1, project development at 6:1 and MIS production at 1:5. It has further reduced data centre power consumption and rack space by 30 percent, server provisioning time from half a day to 30 minutes, besides ensuring zero downtime during physical machine upgrades.
The Vmotion feature ensures seamless migration of virtual machines to a different blade server in case of hardware failure depending on resource availability. This distributed resource scheduling helps in streamlining load across the framework. Moreover, the company enjoys centralised server administration through the virtual centre, which gives a single window view of all virtual machines. It has also reduced downtime to zero during physical machine upgrades.
According to Joshi, all this helped in significantly lowering IT costs and maximising the utilisation of installed hardware, while improving the scalability, flexibility and performance. “Eighty percent of Patni’s virtual machines are running production applications and 90 percent of its internal applications are deployed on these machines. The company’s IT infrastructure now comprises 250 virtual machines on 50 host servers while six people handle the virtualised platform. So the efficiency has visibly improved.”