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About Us | Case Studies
| Client: Southampton City College |
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Southampton City College were due to refresh their server infrastructure in late 2008, but working with their IT partner and virtualisation specialist, Blue Chip, rather than buying like for like hardware they consolidated their servers saving money, power and space.
>> The Client
Southampton City College is the leader in providing education, training and professional development in Southampton for school leavers, adult learners, businesses and international students.
In 2008 the College was due to refresh their 30 aging servers. Rather than take this expensive and time-consuming option, the College investigated the benefits of virtualising their server estate, with VMware's Virtual Infrastructure solution.
>> Solution
Blue Chip implemented VMware VI3.5 including vCenter Server, an EMC CLARiiON CX4 fibre-channel SAN and new rack servers.
The servers were converted from physical servers to virtual servers using VMware vCenter Converter. This reduced the time and workload of converting the 30 servers. The 30 virtual servers now run on five ESX hosts (physical servers). This 6:1 ratio allows for new virtual machines to be run on these servers without the need to buy more hardware.
The project virtualised Microsoft Exchange 2007, SQL Server, media servers and specialist education applications.
In the College environment where new applications are required frequently, the time and cost of testing and deploying these applications is reduced significantly. There is no new hardware to buy, the application can be tested on a virtual network and if anything goes wrong the IT team can start again with a new, clean image.
>> Success and Company Benefit
The project has been very successful and the two immediate benefits realised are the power savings generated and improved business continuity.
It is still very early to calculate power savings; however, recent Blue Chip studies would suggest an annual saving of between £5,000 - £10,000 can be achieved through reduced power and air conditioning
With VMware VI3.5, virtual servers can be copied, moved and stored as files. Therefore, if any server hardware should fail VI3.5 automatically launches the virtual servers on the remaining servers. This also means that maintenance can be done during office hours without the need to stop people working.
Andy May, Head of IT at Southampton City College comments "Since consolidating our servers we are far more confident in our business continuity strategy and management of the server estate is now much easier. We would recommend all organisations go virtual".
Technical Solution
- VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.5
- EMC CLARiiON CX4
- FSC Primergy RX300 Servers
- QLogic HBAs and FC switches
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