'Baby steps' best approach to virtualization

The best way for corporations to embrace virtualization is by adopting the technology gradually, taking "baby steps" until the concept is well understood internally, according to a systems engineer at a leading U.S. insurance company.

Virtualization enables companies to cut down on the number of the computers they use by allowing each of machine to function as a number of virtual machines running different operating systems. Although the technology has already been widely adopted, users can still struggle with the idea of their physical server becoming virtualized, according to Jeff Hunter, a consultant and systems engineer with Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. in Columbus, Ohio.

"It's easier to take baby steps and get started," he said Monday. "People don't always get it. It takes time to grasp the concept." Hunter was speaking during an event to launch virtualization software vendor VMware Inc.'s VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3) suite in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He pointed to Nationwide's own experience with server virtualization.

The insurance and financial services organization, which handles 16 million policies, started dabbling in the technology in 2002, using VMware's Workstation and GSX Server virtualization software for testing and development, he said. Two years later, Nationwide took on additional VMware software, including ESX Server, VirtualCenter management software and the VMotion tool, which facilitates moving up-and-running virtual machines from one server to another.

Currently, Nationwide has deployed more than 475 virtual machines. However, this only represents around 10 percent of the company's total servers, Hunter said. He hopes to have 1,000 virtual machines in place by year-end.

About 32 percent of the 475 virtual machines are operating in Nationwide's production environment running applications, including Citrix, Hyperion, Lotus and PeopleSoft as well as domain controls and file and print services. The other 68 percent of the virtual machines are used by Nationwide for testing, development and disaster recovery. The company has a proof-of-concept or laboratory environment where users can "test drive" virtual machines, Hunter said. "It's like a playground for them, more or less," he added, designed to boost users' comfort level with virtualization.

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