Introducing CIT’s Windows Virtual Server Service

The Center for Information Technology (CIT) is pleased to announce its new Windows virtual hosting service using VMWare software.

What is server virtualization?

Server virtualization allows multiple operating system instances to pull resources from a pool of physical servers, providing access to the memory and processors of that pool of servers. Each operating system runs in isolation, side-by-side on the same physical machine. VMWare acts as the middle man between the virtual server’s operating system and the hardware, allowing the customer to receive a service similar to a dedicated server, even though multiple “virtual systems” are running on the same server.

Virtualization: a lower cost solution

Virtualization maximizes the efficient use of pooled resources, resulting in a lower cost solution over standard dedicated servers.

How virtualization can lower costs:

•	Virtualization decreases the number of administered physical servers, and so reduces overall power and cooling requirements.
•	Operational savings result in a lower charge for CIT customers. Virtual server customers pay about 30 percent less than customers with physical servers.
•	Virtualized systems are highly robust with built-in redundancy. Customer configurations that required multiple servers and load balancers for failover support can leverage the built-in redundancy of the virtualized environment to significantly lower their hardware requirements and costs.

Why should I choose virtualization?

Along with the cost savings mentioned above, virtualization offers additional operational benefits and provides a high quality production environment.

Operational Benefits

Faster and More Flexible Provisioning: Virtualization expedites most steps of the server provisioning process. The flexibility makes implementing additional servers in the server pool easier.

•	Virtual servers can be rapidly deployed through the use of preconfigured master images.
•	System and application disk drives can be configured to more precisely meet customer needs since both will reside on the Storage Area Network (SAN).
•	Standard “virtualized” hardware is presented to the application – guaranteeing compatibility.
•	Ease and speed of implementation of additional “virtual” servers provides options to customers considering test and development configurations.

Decreased Downtime: Virtualization allows servers to remain accessible during maintenance or server failure.

•	During scheduled maintenance, such as hardware replacements, firmware upgrades, and network changes, virtual machines can be non-disruptively moved to other servers, thereby allowing maintenance without downtime.
•	In the event of a physical server failure, virtual machines automatically failover to other remaining servers in the pool. This failover with redundancy allows the customer’s virtual server to remain accessible.
•	The technology provides additional options for future disaster recovery and business continuity solutions.

Higher Capacity Utilization: Virtualization provides customers the ability to easily increase capacity. Shared CPU and memory resources can be increased or decreased among virtual machines to allow for peak or sudden workloads.

•	Virtual machines can be moved from one physical server to another for workload distribution and improved performance.
•	Capacity can be increased and additional hardware can be added into the server pool without impacting the existing customers’ virtual machines.

A High Quality Production Environment

Secure and Robust Systems: Virtualization maximizes uptime of business critical systems and offers effective business continuity.

•	Virtualized machines run in an environment completely isolated from the host machine and other virtual machines.
•	The customer’s virtual system is a fully configured isolated virtual machine with its own set of virtual hardware. If a virtual machine crashes, all others are unaffected.
•	Data does not leak across virtual machines, and applications can only communicate over configured network connections.

CIT’s standard hosting service: Customers using virtualization receive the same premium service that CIT offers its customers with physical servers.

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Virtualization provides the customer with a reliable service identical to a dedicated server, without the complexity of shared servers.

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Other standard services include: Full technical support including full server support, 24 x 7 system monitoring and problem resolution. Software upgrades, hardware maintenance, and backup and recovery services Comprehensive change management. Security validated by a yearly SAS70 audit. Options for firewall and intrusion detection services, and a disaster recovery program available for your critical applications.

CIT’s Windows virtualization standard server offering

The standard server offering includes 2 GB of memory and 50 GB of storage. In addition to the basic offering listed above, CIT can customize the virtual server to meet the customers’ requirements. Because virtual servers run on a pool of servers, the customer has access to more memory on request (up to 4 GB) with Windows 2003 Standard, and more storage (up to 500 GB). The CIT hosting staff provides the same operating system support, patching, security, backup, and monitoring as it does for the dedicated hardware solution. The initial offering does not include support for virtual servers that must reside behind application firewalls or load balancers, but we plan to include that support in the future.

The virtualized Windows environment resides on a pool of servers running under VMWare ESX software. The initial pool configuration consists of 4 servers, each with 4 dual core 3.6 GHz processors and 32 GB of memory, connected to a 10 TB SAN that can be expanded to 35 TB.

How to get more information

If you are interested in the Virtual Server services, please contact the NIH Help Desk either by phone at 301-496-HELP (301-496-4357), 866-319-4357 (toll free), or 301-496-8294 (TTY) or by email at ITHelpDesk@nih.gov.