Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. has about three years' virtualization experience under its belt in both Intel and Unix environments. The entertainment conglomerate was forced to consolidate servers in the summer of 2004 when temperatures in its data center rose above the temperature outside its Burbank, Calif., headquarters. "We were frying the equipment," recalls Harold Shapiro, technology architect at Warner Bros. He says most servers were running at about 5 percent to 10 percent of their capacity.
The company has since consolidated 400 servers. And while Shapiro thought they might virtualize everything, he found Intel-based servers don't handle the high I/O demands well. Consequently, he virtualizes only those apps that are relatively static and not transaction oriented. "VMware likes to say you can virtualize Exchange, etc., but dont do it if performance is critical," Shapiro says.
The highest hurdle for him where virtualization is concerned is the lack of Microsoft support, even though the vendor sells its own virtualization products. Customers at the annual VMworld tradeshow have bemoaned Redmond's indifference to making Active Directory or Exchange part of virtual environments.
"That doesnt work for us, because we need Microsoft when something goes wrong," Shapiro says. The only place Warner uses virtualization is with Internet Information Services (IIS) with Web Services, and some other third-party apps that run in Windows. "You're between a rock and a hard place in virtualizing Microsoft products."
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