A Virtual Lifesaver: Page 2 of 6

At Christus, we decided to conduct an assessment of the potential for server virtualization. By virtualizing a large deployment on a few highly scalable, highly reliable, enterprise-class servers, an organization can substantially reduce costs related to hardware and application purchases, services, and maintenance.

That assessment included an ROI analysis in our Microsoft operating system environment, where the majority of our applications reside and our processing takes place. The assessment revealed some interesting facts about our data center usage:

• 92% of the systems in the San Antonio data center were using 10% or less of their processing power;
• 97% of the systems in that data center were using 20% or less of their processing power;
• 29% of available memory was being used in the data center;
• 22% of available drive space was being used.

The results told us that we had a big IT environment with lots of systems, many of which we weren't using efficiently.

So virtualization appeared to make a lot of sense for Christus. To start the process, we selected the virtualization software: VMware ESX Server. Because of the number and diversity of applications we support, we selected an enterprise-class vendor for the hardware: Hewlett-Packard's ProLiant BL20P and BL25P blade servers. We then assessed what our optimum processing ratio would be. After studying seven to eight different models and configurations--from four-way processors with 4 GB of memory to eight-way processors with 128 GB of memory--we ended with a dual-core processor configuration with 10 to 12 GB of RAM, depending on the application. We estimated a minimum consolidation rate of eight processors to one blade to allow for spikes in processing and memory usage.

In addition, we added an HP EVA 8000 midtier storage system with 10 TB of initial storage to accommodate the pooling of resources and the virtual environment. Mission-critical services are run on an EMC Symmetric frame.