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Users Share Virtualization Pitfalls: Page 7 of 9

Flexibility's important, since his department handles server access and capacity requests from students, faculty, and staff. He gets 15 to 20 requests per semester from students looking to use servers for competitions or capstone projects. VMs are easy to allocate and then shut down after the semester ends. While he and his skeletal staff used to manage 20 servers, they've consolidated down to three. The savings have been so impressive the school's dean just signed off on an order for more virtualization licenses in 2008.

So where were the virtual speed bumps? Beard says drive-space capacity planning problems are inevitable and encourages potential buyers and new adopters to give themselves plenty of time to work this out properly, so that one VM doesn't get short-changed at the expense of another.

"We were handing out way too much drive space -- 70 to 80 GBs per server with students running database apps and video, with IBM servers that had about 400 GBs, but they weren't filling the virtual drive space," he says. They chopped that down to about 40 Gigabytes of space, which has worked out well, at least for now. But two different content types are poised to put a strain on that.

"Many of our next round of projects are video, which takes a lot of storage. And there's a social networking component that business schools are tapping into for long-term case studies and projects for MBA students. So we need to anticipate those," Beard says. "Moore's Law is fantastic, but the pace that media is growing is outpacing Moore. It's insatiable."

He also points to VM backups as a potential pain point. "Backing up a VM is not an easy process -- a piece of that comes with Virtual Center [VMware's management framework], and other third parties," Beard says. "You have to manage the snapshots and full VMs, which means you have to anticipate storage space for the VMs and all their settings."