NAHB Saves With SWsoft

HERNDON, Va. -- The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) estimates setting up new virtual environments using SWsoft Virtuozzo operating system virtualization takes about 15 minutes a dramatic decrease in time compared to one week in the past to set up a dedicated server.

In addition to this rapid deployment capability, savings on servers, software and support costs are estimated at $6,000 per server according to John Yanekian, director of network services at NAHB.

NAHB consolidated several small servers that were running single applications providing specialty functions required by some users. These applications could not co-exist on the same server because there were issues related to port contention or memory space.

"For one reason or another, we would have needed dedicated servers before using Virtuozzo, which gives us the flexibility we need to set up virtual environments and isolate these applications so they can co-exist and run on the same physical server," said John Yanekian.

Along with SWsoft Virtuozzo, NAHB evaluated virtualization technologies from VMware and Microsoft, and chose Virtuozzo for Windows because it offered the best performance and cost efficiency."We didn't see any degradation in terms of hardware performance," said Yanekian.

Currently, NAHB has about 10 virtual environments on each physical server running Virtuozzo. Virtualized workloads include database applications for accounting and budgeting, Web servers, an application for video files, as well as development work.

"Now, it's easy for us to accommodate requests for new applications by simply setting up a virtual environment," said Yanekian. "That's important to our 350 users and 250,000 members of the association."

Using Virtuozzo allows Yanekian to back up and migrate virtual environments as part of planned or unplanned downtime events and he says there are "no worries" over how long a server is down because applications continue running in a different virtual environment.

SWsoft Inc.0