Virtualization

The Information Technology Services Department at Haywood Community College has implemented a four year plan to virtualize the Information Technology Environment.  This allows the IT office to consolidate multiple services onto fewer physical servers and resources.  

A server centric environment requires a different server and operating system for every application such as e-mail, Internet, data management and storage, and instructional management systems.   The data center becomes crowded with servers that serve only one function.  Only a small percentage of the server capacity might be used to maintain that one application. 

With virtualization several operating systems and applications can operate independently on a single server.  By virtualizing operating systems and software, the physical resources of one server are shared by several operating systems and applications.  This maximizes the use of expensive physical resources.  Energy  consumption is reduced because fewer machines are necessary to stay operational for the same number of applications and operating systems.  To date, ITS has reduced the number of physical servers from 28 to 23 servers.   Our plan is to reduce the total number of physical servers to less than ten. 

Virtualization has also enabled the ITS department implement disaster recovery procedures that reduce the amount of downtime.  Configured correctly, if one physical server fails, another server takes over supporting applications and operating systems.  The campus community never knows there is a hardware failure and the ITS staff can repair the hardware without the stress of business services disrupted until ITS can fix the problem.