Siemens PLM Software India : Virtualizing UNIX Platforms

Cost containment & need for infrastructure consolidation were the driving forces behind this project

Monday, June 01, 2009

Print

Comment

Email

Digg

Del.icio.us

Reddit

Twitter

The company uses Windows and UNIX platforms extensively. For running its products on these platforms the company had to heavily invest on purchasing hardware for various platforms. For proprietary UNIX platforms such as AIX, HP-UX and SUN Solaris, the hardware required was comparatively expensive than Intel. Also the proprietary UNIX hardware when compared to x86 based machines deliver high compute power that remains under-utilized while running a single instance of operating system on a single box. Considering budget constraints and the need for infrastructure consolidation, the company realized there was a need to explore technologies that would allow them to utilize the hardware to be used for running more instances of software. As a solution to the challenge it was decided to use UNIX virtualization technologies with which a single UNIX hardware could be used to run multiple instances of virtual operating systems. The company chose to leverage IBM's Virtual IO Server (VIOS) and HP Integrity Virtual Machines (IVM) for their IBM AIX and HP-UX OSes. Using these virtualization software on respective hardware was believed to be a very complex and expensive proposition by a customer. But contrary to this thought, after doing this implementation, the company realized it wasn't that expensive considering the cost benefits that are being reaped in the form of infrastructure consolidation, better provisioning and manageability of resources and also in form of cost containment. This project is specially beneficial to software developers who use virtual instances for their day to day development work.

Page(s)   1