SUPERSIZE ME Todd OConnell IT Manager School of

SUPERSIZE ME

Todd O’Connell IT Manager School of Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences University of Queensland

UQ - School of Medicine n n n 2 x Restructures 1 x Review 3 Divisions 7+ disciplines in a division 7 sites (metro and rural Qld)

Scope Pre-Consolidated Environment • • 56 Servers (NT, 2000, 2003) 9 Domains 4 Email servers (MS Exchange 5. 5, 2003, MWAC) 4 Server Rooms in 3 buildings over two sites 6 MS SQL (v 7 and 2000) 800+ Users 10 IT staff Local DNS, DHCP, WINS, AD, IIS, FTP

How to Super Size n n n n Purchase what ever when ever Always get the biggest Always purchase the cheapest Keep equipment as long as you can Don’t worry about capacity Find a work around and never upgrade Don’t document anything Never have anyone responsible for any one particular thing

A change in thinking

n n If we were reducing our physical infrastructure could virtualisation help? Contraction and expansion of physical infrastructure following consolidation.

Consolidation & Virtualisation Consolidating before virtualising: pros and cons. n n n Effort required to consolidate and aggregate servers/services Re-organise job roles and responsibilities Skilled staff

Virtualisation Pros n n n Less physical boxes Less data centre space Less power/air-conditioning? Faster provisioning of servers when virtualised. Hours vs days/weeks Separates dependence on older hardware Production and development environments. (ITIL considerations)

Virtualisation Cons n n Explaining it Less physical boxes Capacity planning Redundancy/DR considerations

Virtualisation Progress n n n 2 server rooms two sites 18 physical servers 11 virtual servers (Windows, Linux) Phase 1 of virtualisation complete Phase 2 to be complete in 2007

Our Experience n n Does less really mean less? Yes physically, but you still need to watch virtual server sprawl.