ICICI Bank : Enterprise Server Virtualization

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Enterprise Server Virtualization project was a move by ICICI bank to save cost in terms of real estate, power consumption, and hardware by doing datacenter consolidation with using virtualization. The number of servers were growing so rapidly within the four walls of the datacenter that it became highly imperative to have a strategy to reduce the number of servers which in turn would result in saving on power and space. Consolidation of servers in a virtualized environment looked to be the right strategy to address this. The biggest challenge in front of the organization was to still maintain the reliability and availability of the services which are being served to 20 million customers of ICICI bank.

The Implementation
The consolidation and virtualization strategy is to reduce the old and low configuration servers from the datacenter and replace them with high-end latest technology servers (viz. dual core, quad core etc) at the same time to provide a real time infrastructure to various applications hosted in this environment.

The bank has essentially installed VMWare for the Database servers running SQL instances, for Application servers like Websphere, Pramati and Oracle application servers and for Web servers. Around 54 VMWare ESX servers (Base server) have been installed till date: 43 ESX servers implemented at Primary and 11 ESX servers at DR site, hosting around 550 virtual servers which include production, standby, UAT, and development servers.

The old servers had 2 CPU dual core, 4 CPU dual core , and 8 CPU dual core servers. As a strategy, the current implementation has been done only on 8 CPU dual core servers with 64 GB RAM so that the features of over commitment of memory and CPU resources of VMWare can be utilized and the setup is able to scale up instead of scale out taking full advantage of the licenses deployed.

Pravir Vohra is the Group CTO at ICICI Bank. In this role, he is responsible for the IT strategy & innovation, enterprise architecture, process automation and leveraging technology synergies across ICICI Bank and its group companies Pravir Vohra, Group CTO Inputs from Muralidhar Ayyagari, Project Head Q What were the problems that ICICI faced before the deployment? •Servers sprawl •Too many racks holding windows servers •Maintenance of the numerable servers •Increased power consumption •Increased operating expenditure Q What benefits were incurred after the deployment? •Reduction in number of windows servers •Quick provisioning of servers •Savings in real estate •Savings in power •Lower TCO •Reduction of the annual maintenance costs •Single pane of glass for maintenance and monitoring of the servers •High availability •Impetus to go-green initiative

An average of 25 to 30 servers has been consolidated on one 8 CPU dual core with 64 GB RAM which are production systems. However to de-risk the failure of the server, VMotion and manual movement of the VMs are carried out.

One of the X4600 servers is holding 51 VMs comprising of web, application, and database servers, which by itself is a benchmark of vitalizing such a huge number of machines in one single physical box. The server holds production and UAT slices.

Further to decrease the usage of multiple network cards, as a strategy the servers are moved to the same subnet of the NAS storage so that same network card can be virtualized and deployed and also the connectivity to the storage through iSCSI is persistent and there are not too many hops to reach the storage.

The Primary servers hosting the VMWare base ESX servers are Sun Microsystem's X4600 server with 16 Core CPUs 64 GB RAM and four 1 Gbps NIC cards (can grow upto 12 NIC cards), HBA cards (for SAN Connectivity), and SuperMicro servers with 16 cores and 64 GB RAM with six 1 Gbps NIC cards.

The Impact
With the deployment of this project the company is not only able to save cost in terms of space and physical servers, but it's also able to save on electricity bills, thereby contributing to the 'Green IT' cause.

Additionally it has provided more scalable environments to its users with the help of over commitment functionality of VMWare. In terms of user acceptance of the project, the users now no longer ask for a server, but instead ask for a VM Slice.

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