Gardner: Why virtualize mission-critical applications, things like police and fire support, first?

Sindicic: First of all, it’s always been challenging in disaster recovery and business continuity. Keeping those things in mind, our CAD/RMS systems for the police center and also our fire staffing   system were  high on the list for protecting. Those are Tier 1   applications that we  want to be able to recover very quickly.

We thought the best way to do that was to virtualize them and set us up for future business continuity and true failover and disaster recovery.

So    I put it to my CIO, and he okayed it. We went forward with VMware,    because we saw they had the best, most robust, and mature applications    to support us. Seeing that our back-end was SQL for those two systems, and seeing that we were just going to embark  on  a  brand-new upgrading of our CAD/RMS system, this was a prime time  to   jump on the bandwagon and do it.

Also, with our back-end storage being NetApp, and NetApp having such an intimate relationship with VMware, we decided to go with VMware.

Gardner: So you were able to accomplish your virtualization and also gain that disaster recovery and business continuity benefit, but you pointed out  the time was of the essence. How long did  it take you?.

Sindicic: Back in early fiscal year 2010, I started doing all the research. I    probably did a good nine months of research before even bringing this    option to my CIO. Once I brought the option up, I worked with my    vendors, VMware and NetApp, to obtain best pricing for the solution that    I wanted.

I started implementation in October and completed  the   process in March. So it took some time. Then we went live with our    CAD/RMS system on May 10, and it has been very robust and running    beautifully ever since.

Gardner: Tell me about your IT operations.

Sindicic: I have our finance system, an Oracle-based system, which consists of an Oracle database server and Apache applications server, and another reporting server that runs on a    different platform. Those will all be virtual OSs sitting in one of my    two clusters.

For the police systems, I have a separate cluster    just for police and fire. Then, in the regular day-to-day business,  like   finance and other applications that the city uses, I have a  campus   cluster to keep those things separated and to also relieve any  downtime   of maintenance. So everything doesn’t have to be affected if  I'm moving   virtual servers among systems and patching and doing  updates.

Other applications

We’re also going to be virtualizing several other applications, such as a citizen complaint application called Coplogic. We're going to be putting that in as well into the PD cluster.

The version of VMware that we’re using is 4.1, we’re using ESXi server. On the PD cluster, I have two ESXi servers and on my campus, I have three. I'm using vSphere 4, and it’s been really wonderful having a good handle on that control.

Also, within my vSphere, vCenter server,    I've installed a bunch of NetApp storage control solutions that allow    me to have centralized control over one level snapshotting and    replication. So I can control it all from there. Then vSphere gives me    that beautiful centralized view of all my VMs and resources being consumed.

It’s    been really wonderful to be able to have that level of view into my    infrastructure, whereas when the things were distributed, I hadn’t had    that view that I needed. I’d have to connect one by one to each one of    my systems to get that level.

Also, there are some things that we’ve learned during this whole thing. I went from two VLANs to four VLANs. When looking at your traffic and the type of traffic    that’s going to traverse the VLANs, you want segregate that out big  time   and you’ll see a huge increase in your performance.

The other thing is making sure that you have the correct type of drives in your storage. I knew that right off the bat that IOPS was going to be an issue and then, of course, connectivity. We’re using  Brocade switches to connect to the backend fiber channel drives for the  server VMs, and for lower-end storage, we’re using iSCSI.

Gardner: And how has the virtualization efforts within all of that worked out?

Sindicic: It’s been wonderful. We’ve had wonderful disaster recovery capabilities. We have snapshotting abilities. I'm snapshotting the primary database server and application server,    which allows for snapshots up to three weeks in primary storage and   six  months on secondary storage, which is really nice, and it has   served us  well.

We already had a fire drill, where one report   was  accidentally deleted out of a database due to someone doing   something --  and I'll leave it at that. Within 10 minutes, I was able   to bring up  the snapshot of the records management system of that   database.

The  user was able to go into the test database,   retrieve his document, and  then he was able to print it. I was able to   export that document and  then re-import it into the production system.   So there was no downtime.  It literally took 10 minutes, and everybody   was happy.

... We   are seeing cost benefits now. I don’t have  all the metrics, but we’ve   spun up six additional VMs. If you figure  out the cost of the Dells,    because we are a Dell shop, it would cost anywhere between $5,000 and    $11,000 per server. On top of that, you're talking about the cost of   the  Microsoft Software Assurance for that operating system. That has saved a lot of money right there   in  some of the projects that we’re currently embarking on, and for the    future.

We have several more systems that I know are going to  be   coming online and we're going to save in cost. We’re going to save  in   power. Power consumption, I'm projecting, will slowly go down over  time   as we add to our VM environment.

As it grows and it becomes more robust, and it will, I'm looking forward to a large cost savings over a 5- to 10-year period.

Better insight

Gardner: Was there anything that surprised you that you didn’t expect, when  you moved from the physical to the virtualized environment?

Sindicic: I was pleasantly surprised with the depth of reporting  that  I could  physically see, the graph, the actual metrics, as we were   ongoing. As  our CAD system came online into production, I could  actually  see  utilization go up and to what level.

I was  also pleasantly   surprised to be able to see to see when the backups would  occur, how it   would affect the system and the users that were on it.  Because of  that,  we were able to time them so that would be the  least-used hours  and what  those hours were. I could actually tell in  the system when it  was the  least used.

It was real time and it  was just really  wonderful to  be able to easily do that, without having  to manually  create all the  different tracking ends that you have to do  within Microsoft Monitor or anything like that. I could do that completely independently of the OS.

Gardner: We're hearing a lot here at VMworld about  desktop virtualization as well. I don’t know whether you’ve looked at  that, but it seems  like  you've set yourself up for moving in that  direction. Any thoughts   about mobile or virtualized desktops as a future  direction for you?

On the horizon

Sindicic: I see that most definitely on the horizon. Right now, the only thing    that's hindering us is cost and storage. But as storage goes down, and    as more robust technologies come out around storage, such as solid  state, and as the price comes down on that, I foresee that something  definitely coming into our environment.

Even here at the conference I'm taking a bunch of VDI and VMware View sessions, and I'm looking forward to hopefully starting a new project with virtualizing at the desktop level.

This    will give us much more granular control over not only what’s on the    user’s desktop, but patch management and malware and virus protection,    instead of at the PC level doing it the host level, which would be    wonderful. It would give us really great control and hopefully decreased    cost. We’d be using a different product than probably what we’re  using   right now.

If you're actually using virus protection at  the  host  level, you’re going to get a lot of bang for your buck and  you  won't  have any impact on the PC-over-IP. That’s probably the way we we'll go, with PC-over-IP.

Right    now, storage, VLANing all that has to happen, before we can even   embark  on something like that. So there's still a lot of research on my   part  going on, as well as finding a way to mitigate costs, maybe   trade-in,  something to gain something else. There are things that you   can do to  help make something like this happen.

... In city government, our IT  infrastructure   continues to grow as people are laid off and  departments want to   automate more and more processes, which is the  right way to go. The IT   staff remains the same, but the  infrastructure, the data, and the   support continues to grow. So I'm  trying to implement infrastructure   that grows smarter, so we don’t  have to work harder, but work smarter,  so that we can do a lot more with less.

VMware   sure does allow  that with centralized control in management, with   being able to  dynamically update virtual desktops, virtual servers, and   the patch  management and automation of that. You can take it to   whatever level of  automation you want or a little in between, so that   you can do a little  bit of check and balances with your own eyes,   before the system goes off  and does something itself.

Also, with   the high availability and  fault tolerance that VMware allows, it's   been invaluable. If one of my  systems goes down, my VMs automatically   will be migrated over, which is a  wonderful thing. We’re looking to   implement as much virtualization as  we can as budget will allow.

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