Taking the Long-Term View of Virtualization

Hello and happy New Year, Inner Circle readers. I hope my first letter of 2008 will find you rested and ready for the challenges of the new year. I'm looking forward to an interesting challenge that begins this month as my group begins rolling out an aggressive IT consolidation program.

This initiative, called the Sun Integrated Business Information Solution (IBIS) program, will change the way IT is provisioned at Sun — and the way users connect to IT.

Virtualization is a cornerstone of these efforts. To give you an overview of what Sun has accomplished with virtualization — and how we plan to leverage virtualization in the future — I’ve called on Chuck Hellier, who is lead infrastructure architect at Sun. Chuck’s duties require him to take the long view of how technology should be implemented. He's an ideal person to walk you through the areas where virtualization has provided Sun with very significant results and how virtualization will help make the IBIS project succeed.

So, without further ado, take it away, Chuck.

Sun Ray Thin Clients Cut Traditional Desktop Costs
Thanks, Bob. As you've mentioned many times, the proof of any virtualization or consolidation solution can be found not just in how efficient it makes technical assets, but also in how it improves the value of other assets, such as employee productivity. As Sun Inner Circle readers will discover in this month’s feature article, desktop virtualization has gone a long way to cost-effectively keep people productive.

At an organization of Sun's size, going the thin-client route with stateless Sun Ray clients has had a tremendous impact over the last six years. When you consider that Sun IT supports a technical ecosystem in 170 countries for 50,000 users, the prospect of supporting individual desktop systems becomes daunting.

Instead, Sun users log into any desktop environment through easily accessible Sun Ray thin clients, connected to 950 servers that house approximately 1200 applications. With virtualization capabilities that allow most laptops and PCs to access servers, Sun employees and partners have more options to work — without burdening IT.

Standalone desktop systems with applications stored on hard drives is hardly an alternative — the costs and time to maintain and manage these systems is cost-prohibitive. A large enterprise that depends on Microsoft Windows machines typically requires one system administrator for every 200 desktops.

Yet just seven system administrators manage and maintain servers supporting the Sun Ray system for all users in the Sun network. If Sun was a Windows shop, we'd need to add 243 systems administrators to manage thousands of isolated PCs.

In dollar terms, Sun is avoiding about $21 million a year in costs for those 243 system administrators — and we’re saving about $2.8 million annually in power costs with the energy-efficient thin clients.

Consolidation Efforts Get into the Zone
Rather than managing PCs, our seven Sun Ray systems administrators spend much of their time reallocating resources so that end users can do their jobs as efficiently as possible. These professionals work with other members of Sun IT who oversee a massive infrastructure of 5000 datacenter servers that hold more than 280 TB of data. This infrastructure serves up more than 4.4 million internal Web pages, over 600,000 Web hits, 5 million e-mails, and 22 million Java downloads every day.

As demand on IT continues to grow, the number of server-based applications has grown as well. Rather than expand staff or add servers, Sun’s IBIS program is using Solaris Containers and Solaris Zones, built into the Solaris 10 OS, to reduce infrastructure requirements.

IBIS is an ambitious consolidation effort that is expected to reduce datacenter server costs from $3.75 million to $2.25 million by the end of fiscal year 2008 — a savings of $1.5 million. Consolidation of hardware investments and reduced staff time make up the majority of these savings.

In the short term, the initiative will reduce half — or 600 — of the 1200 applications currently in use at Sun down to 50 applications. A review of business processes concluded that there is no compelling case to support 1200 systems, all of which take server space and require hands-on IT management. The remaining 600 applications not part of the initial IBIS thrust are in legacy systems used for development; these systems will be consolidated over the next few years.

To improve efficiency of business processes in accounting, product development, and other areas, Sun is replacing in January 2008 the first 600 applications in the IBIS overhaul with 72 modules of Oracle processes — nearly everything Oracle offers, with the exception of HR modules. These modules will provide the foundation for nearly all of Sun's business and Web applications.

To do so, the Sun environment is being rearchitected to use Solaris Containers virtualization capabilities to run Web, database, and application servers. These virtualization features combine system resource controls with zones that act as isolated, standalone servers within the operating system.

With Sun IBIS, certain applications and systems are being placed in particular zones for optimal efficiency. For example, Web server applications reside in a particular zone, while Oracle database systems reside in another. Zones also allow production and nonproduction instances of an application on the same host, which reduces the time required to manage workloads. This kind of consolidation also lowers hardware footprint, which reduces operating space and cost.

Sun Plans for Future Consolidation with Logical Domains
Rather than merely address problems such as server sprawl and poor utilization, Sun's IBIS strategy involves anticipating changes and planning for virtualization opportunities. Sun’s Logical Domains (LDoms) virtualization technology, which enables creation of fully operational virtual machines, will be used to increase security and allow more architectural choices for database servers.

LDoms sitting above a hypervisor or virtual machine monitor, such as those built into Sun UltraSPARC T1 or T2 processors or in Sun’s upcoming xVM, VMware ESX, or Xen virtualization layers, are referred to as Type 1 virtual machines (VMM1). VMM1 monitors are software devices that run on the bare metal of the system and allow several guest operating systems to run on top of the host on the same computing platform simultaneously. Thanks to these capabilities, Sun plans to use both LDoms and Solaris Zones to create virtualized environments within virtualized environments, for maximum scalability.

VMM2 environments run within an operating system. Examples are Parallels desktop, VMware Fusion, or Microsoft Virtual PC.

Plus, an LDom may be configured with as few resources as a single thread and 1 GB of memory, while a physical domain typically requires multiple CPUs and multiple gigabytes of memory. Sun will eventually use VMM1 environments to deploy applications and systems, regardless of system architecture. This will allow current applications to run on tomorrow's architectures. As the IBIS program progresses, Sun is preparing to use LDoms native functionality built into UltraSPARC processor-based servers.

As the IBIS program grows to incorporate legacy servers and storage, the LDoms expansion will give Sun the ability to consolidate all components of its IT infrastructure. Because each LDom is a full-featured virtual machine, it allows IT to automate most application provisioning.

Sun foresees a time very soon when provisioning applications will require just a few clicks — and the database server, application server and MySQL database will be configured via Web page. And with these automation capabilities in place, Sun will be able to dramatically improve the value of technical assets — while also enhancing productivity through rapid data access and management.

Bob Worrall
CIO, Sun Microsystems, Inc.