Conseco stops server proliferation virtually

Computerworld - Until recently, Conseco Finance Corp., like many other organizations, was struggling to find a way to control the rapid proliferation of small Intel-based servers across the company.

The systems, which were being purchased at the rate of about one per week, were being used to run a variety of very small Windows-based applications, such as domain controllers and encryption and antivirus services.

In many cases, the Intel servers that were being purchased were severely underutilized because the applications required only a fraction of the available resources, says Rod Lucero, chief IT architect at St. Paul, Minn.-based Conseco Finance.

But because of the technical challenges involved in running more than one application on a single instance of the Windows operating system, Conseco had to buy individual servers for each new application, says Lucero.

"We really wanted to find a technology that would not require us to go out and buy little pizza boxes every week," Lucero says. So nine months ago, Conseco started using virtualization technology from VMware Inc. in Palo Alto, Calif. VMware sells software-based partitioning products that allow users to take a single Intel box and carve it up into multiple smaller "virtual" servers, each of which can run a separate Windows or Linux application.

For instance, a four-processor Intel "host" box can be sliced up into 12 virtual servers for running 12 separate applications. The partitions are completely isolated from one another and can run their own copies of "guest" server operating systems such as Microsoft Corp.'s Windows 2000 Server and Advanced Server, as well as Red Hat Inc.'s Linux distribution.

VMware's software allows administrators to allocate processing power, memory and disk space as appropriate to the applications running inside each virtual partition. To an application, each virtual machine looks exactly like a physical system.

"The virtual machine is stored as a single file inside the host operating system," says Diane Greene, president of VMware. "When the guest operating system is writing to its disk, it is actually writing inside a file" on the host system, she explains.

Such capabilities have allowed Conseco to rein in Wintel server proliferation and provided for much better resource utilization, says Lucero. "We use it as a corporate standard for Windows 2000 and NT servers," he says.

"The only place where we would not use virtual servers would be for applications that have an extremely high processing requirement or absolutely need more than one processor to run," Lucero says. That's because VMware's software currently allows a maximum of only one processor to be dedicated to an application running inside a virtual partition.