At a glance, you might think Montreal’s Collège St-Jean de Vianney is well advanced in its computer virtualization project. But talk to Patrick Plante, the institution’s IT manager, and you might come away with a different picture – one that may well illustrate the state of the virtual technology industry.
Certainly this elementary-level school known for high academic achievement has server virtualization licked – out of necessity. According to Plante, St-Jean de Vianney’s server count had ballooned to 16, and managing the boxes had become an issue. Server updates required that the school shut down access to all of the 200-plus computers in the labs and library, and on teachers’ desks, because the servers hosted all the institution’s applications. This also meant that if one application went down, the school would have to restart the app’s host server – and since the host was home to applications aside from the performance affected program, access to the other apps would be affected as well.
So St-Jean de Vianney implemented Microsoft Corp.’s Hyper-V hypervisor in Windows Server 2008. The technology virtualized the server infrastructure – essentially rearranging bits and pieces of the 16 servers and squeezing more performance out of them. Now the college has just four physical servers each running four virtual servers. The IT team also installed Microsoft’s System Center Virtual Machine Manager, making the environment easier to manage.
Mission accomplished? Hardly. The school is considering implementing application virtualization next – technology that essentially fools computers into thinking all applications play nice and never conflict with each other or computer file systems. This allows organizations to use older hardware for a longer time – important for cost-conscious organizations. “We can’t change the desktops every two to three years,” Plante says.
