New technology added at Pella Schools

With the help of Alliance Technologies – Iowa’s largest full-service IT provider and the only Iowa-based VMware Authorized Consultant, Pella Community Schools were able to refresh the hardware powering their Windows environment. They had also begun a server virtualization product with open source Xen to power their linux server environment and were also looking for a virtualization option that could have better support than Xen and more features for the linux server hosting.

VMware ESX server was the answer.

Server Virtualiation at its simplest form is a way to deliver hardware through software. The virtualization software that leads the market right now is VMware ESX Server. This VMware software, allows users to “carve” up the resources of a today’s powerful servers into many virtual machines that can be used to run today’s database servers, file servers, web servers as well as virtual PCs for user access to their programs and data.

The average utilization of a computer’s performance capability is less than 5 percent. This would be like purchasing a 10 story building for your business, and only setting up office in the half of the first floor. Virtualization allows businesses to use the whole computer.

Alliance Technologies met with represenatives from the Pella Community School District to present some basic options for VMware-based solutions that could handle their needs for server hosting as well as basic Disaster Recovery capabilities. Sean Clark, of Alliance Technologies, designed a two server solution that allowed for all virtual machines to run on a single server if a server was to fail. Clark also designed a backup solution that allows critical virtual machines to be restored to the DR site within hours of a disaster to the main datacenter at the middle school.

The entire project took about 30 hours to install and configure and transfer knowledge to Eric Pingel, Technology Advisor and Jeff Anderson, Technology Coordinator. They now have approximately 12 virtual servers running on 2 physical VMware servers. According to VMware’s “green” calculator (http://www.vmware. com/solutions/green/calculator.html) this initiative saves Pella tax payers $15,000 in server costs over 3 years, about $1,700 in power costs over 3 years. These savings are equivalent to planting 240 trees or taking 18 cars off the highway. There definitely is a green advantage to server virtualization, but the business benefits are the most compelling reason to pursue virtualization.

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