Virtualisation case study: Barossa Council

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 31 August 2011 14:28

Business IT - Technology

Is a virtualisation project on your agenda? Planning might be boring, but it is crucial for success.

Ryan England, ICT manager at the Barossa Council, says his only regret about a recent server virtualisation project was that he didn't do it sooner.

The trigger for the project was that a large proportion of the council's 18 physical servers were reaching the end of their lease. Those servers were running core business applications under a variety of versions of Windows, and without the benefit of a single management tool.

The 18 servers were replaced by four physical servers (with another two serving as backups), with virtual machines running servers dedicated to a single role. Barossa chose Hyper-V as the hypervisor as "it's now a mature platform" that was covered by the council's existing licences. Mr England had also seen good results with Hyper-V at similar sized sites.

Furthermore, System Center provided a good way of managing such an environment either locally or remotely. He is now considering the use of additional modules.

"The power saving was a big thing for us," he said, and was noticeable in the electrity bills to someone that wasn't aware of the nature of the changes. Part of that came from the reduced power draw of the new servers, but they also reduced the load on the air conditioning system, allowing additional savings.

Page 2: No impact on business during changeover.