Green with Hyper-V

Virtualisation rollout cuts Chester Zoo’s energy bill by £11,000 a year and gives ROI in under three years.

In terms of both customers and acreage, Chester is the UK’s biggest zoo. The 450-acre site receives around 1.3 million visitors each year, and has more than 7,000 animals and 400 different species, including many endangered ones.

As the zoo’s data-storage requirements have increased over the years, so has the need for additional servers, and the server room’s air conditioning system was beginning to struggle with the levels of heat being released.

Chester Zoo IT manager Phil Morris said: “I’d started to feel that we shouldn’t increase the number of servers because of the limited air conditioning capacity – increasing storage in that way simply wasn’t sustainable.”

To control the over-heating problem the zoo decided to reduce the number of physical servers in the server room and maintain its model of one application per server. It decided to deploy virtualisation.

After rejecting what Morris claims was a “colossal” quote from VMware to virtualise Chester Zoo’s server estate, Morris looked at Microsoft’s Hyper-V system.

He said: “They gave us an affordable price, particularly as Chester Zoo’s registered charity status meant we received a good concession with our licensing fees.”

Initially Chester rolled out test environments using the Hyper-V R1, but didn’t want to perform a full migration until the R2 version shipped, because it was keen to deploy R2′s Live Migration feature, which allows virtual servers to be moved in real time.

Chester virtualised its accounts, time attendance, and personnel systems as well as two electronic point-of-sale (Epos) servers plus a number of databases.

Morris said: “We’re committed to virtualising as much physical tin into our virtualised environment as possible.”

It took between one and two hours to virtualise each server, which are all now 64-bit; the previous servers were 32-bit.

The system saves the zoo money as a result of the reduced power required. Morris said: “We’re saving almost £11,000 per year, and we’ll achieve a return on investment in under three years through these savings and not having to buy extra hardware.”

Chester Zoo’s green credentials have always been impressive – it has twice won the Queen’s Award for Enterprise (Sustainable Development) – and virtualising its servers will further reduce its carbon footprint.

However, the virtualisation project was justified on the basis of the savings the business would make.

Chester Zoo has yet to virtualise its Exchange server, but has plans to do so. “We’ll look to move to Exchange 2010 and put that on a virtual system. Currently we’re on Exchange 2003,” said Morris.

Chester Zoo now has six 64-bit systems, three of them are dual CPU, quad-core Dell 2950 servers running 3.2GHz processors with 32GB of system memory.

There are several factors that can limit application performance; they are the CPU processing power, and how much memory is available, with memory being the more costly thing, according to Morris.

“When we bought the boxes we insisted that they were configured with the biggest [memory] chips in such a way that we could purchase new chips and take memory up to the maximum allowable [64GB],” he added.
Source: computing.co.uk