Bank of New Zealand - VirtualizationJohn Marshall

Senior Technical Specialist – Bank of New Zealand

Agenda

1. Overview of Bank of New Zealand2. Background before Virtualization:

IT InfrastructureBusiness Challenges

3. Approach to VirtualizationKey Design PointsChallenges and Design Decisions

4. Virtualization Solution approach and outcomesPositioned as our Preferred PlatformHardware Solution and SizingOur VI ComponentsOur Virtualized Workloads and ApplicationsSome Technical learnings

5. Overall benefits and learnings6. Future directions

Overview of Bank of New Zealand

Bank of New ZealandOne of New Zealand's leading financial services providers.Committed to being carbon neutral by 2010.Strategic Themes - Simplification, Culture.

Banking Delivery ServicesMy Business Unit – Infrastructure Design.

Technology & Design Consultants to the Bank and Operations teams.

My VMware ExposureSince 2001 - VMware Workstation, GSX, ESX 2.x, ESX 3.5, VDI

Our Virtualization Progress108 VM’s in Production, 70 in Test/POC.

Background Before Virtualization

IT Infrastructure - 2005Ageing fleet of servers.

NT Remediation – opportunity to replace 50-60% of server fleet during Operating System Upgrades/Redesigns.

Application & server sprawl - server consolidation opportunities.

Full Data Centres

Disparate Hardware

Business ChallengesCarbon Neutral Goals

Service Provisioning and Speed to Market

Project lead times >4-6 weeks.

High cost and effort from POC to Production

Data centre physical space and environmental issues.

Approach to Virtualization

Key Design GoalsPosition as Preferred x86 PlatformImprove Service Availability, through physical redundancy, HA and DRSReduce provisioning complexity, templates and pre-provisioned resourcesServer, Cabling and Cabinet ConsolidationGreen and Carbon Neutral TargetsHardware Savings, Improved utilization and efficiencies.Environments to support development lifecycle

Challenges and Design DecisionsSoftware / Vendor SupportConsolidation Ratios 30:1Support Multiple NetworksData Centre PortabilityVertical Scaling

Our Virtual Infrastructure Overview

Technical Design– Hardware Solution

Hardware Solution and Sizing3 Server Clusters Auckland, Wellington and Test

VMware ESX 3.0.1 and 3.5 Hosts25-30:1 VM’s per Physical Host4 VM’s / core.Quad Socket – Dual and Quad Core Servers

HP DL580G5 Quad CoreHP DL580G4 Dual CoreConsidered BL680c blades - but didn’t have the chassis population to support server separation.

40GB of Ram3 Quad NICSSized to accept 1 server failure during recovery of full infrastructure.

VM Sizing1GB-2GB RAM / VMLow to Medium - CPU and Network utilisation servers

Virtualized Production Workload and Applications

Infrastructure ServersMicrosoft DHCP

Microsoft IIS

Microsoft WINS

Microsoft MOSS

Microsoft SharePoint

Microsoft MOM

Microsoft SQL 2005

.Net Test, Dev and Prod Environments

BMC Patrol

Wise Packaging Studio

McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

Tripwire Security Servers

NICE Web Server

Microsoft SNA – Host Integration Server

Rational Web Server

HotDocs

Application ServersLotus Domino Development Servers

Lotus Domino Application Servers

IBM/Lotus Sametime Instant Messaging

Kana

IMEX

Microsoft Terminal Servers

Citrix Terminal Servers

Citrix and Terminal Services License Servers

RightFax

Mercantile

TransAct

PowerTax

Linux Servers – RHEL IBM WebSphere

XP Workstations for Remote Workers

Dev - TestOur Entire Test Domain Infrastructure is Virtualised.

Virtualization - Our Progress So Far!

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2005 2006 2007 2008 2009

Physical x86

VM's

Our x86 Virtualisation Progress - Production

Design Point – Preferred Platform

Goal - Position VMware as the Preferred x86 PlatformServer & Service Placement Selection Criteria

Tier 1 Physical Hardware or Linux Virtualisation IFLTier 2-4 Virtualized onto VMware ESX Infrastructure

80% Savings per server - in hardware procurement alone!Full test environment for POC, development and testing.Test Environment is near fully Virtualised

Non x86 VM Candidates – Consolidated onto HP BladesConsolidated Services Farms – SQL, Lotus Domino, File and Print Clusters.

We ask ourselves, does this deserve its own large physical server?

Software / Vendor Support - Our TakePOC is built and tested in our ESX Test Environment anyway.Vendors often prefer and supply us VM’s for POC and Demo Labs.Happy to rebuild on physical hardware to satisfy support ticket if required – this has never been necessary!

The Technology

Technical Design - Portable Data CentreGoal

Flexible Design to support VM and Data Centre portability without adding VM configuration complexity.

SolutionVirtual Data Centre covers Auckland and Wellington Production and Test

Right-click migrations from Test to ProdRight-click migrations – across country data centres.

Port Group Labels in Auckland and Wellington are consistentWhen a VM is moved, all that needs changing is the Guest IP AddressDHCP used to reserve IP’s for IP sensitive Servers

Technical Design– Network Consolidation & Virtualization

GoalTo reduce the requirement for excessive physical components such as NIC’s, switch ports and cabling, and improve the scalability of the VMware services.

SolutionNetwork - vSwitch VLAN Port groups with 802.1q VLAN Tagging.

Physical ESX ports support multiple VLANs trunked at Cisco Switch.

Cisco LACP – Link Aggregation across switches, competed with VMware’s load balancing causing MAC address flapping - so was not used in the trunk configuration.

Improves the scalability of the environment, through logical changes rather than additional cabling.

3*Quad NIC’s provide expansion capability if required.

Overall Benefits and Learning - Better, Faster, Cheaper

Power Savings

Hardware & Floor Space Savings

Provisioning - Within an hour.

VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3, an excellent fit for small and large production and test environments.

Carbon Neutral Goals

What’s Next for Bank of New Zealand Virtualisation

Investigations IntoVDI – Desktop Virtualisation – POC and 3.0 Beta Program

VCB – LAN free backups.

SRM – Disaster Recovery & SAN replication.

Summary & Advice on Getting StartedVMware technology has so many benefits, its hard to go wrong!

ESXi Plug and Play – No Linux Skills RequiredBuild a Test & POC EnvironmentBreak even at 6:1 ConsolidationSupport Networks, VMware Communities, VMware Forums, VMware Downloads and DocumentationVMware Local Support Services

SummaryHopefully I’ve given you a glance at the sizing, design considerations and decisions we have made to make VMware Virtual Infrastructure our preferred x86 platform.Thank you for your time.