Virtualisation the answer for council

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After moving their servers to a virtualised system, Newcastle-Under-Lyme borough council has tapped the technology to provide disaster recovery and is now trialling virtual desktop computers.

Aside from the possible cost savings and the ability to quickly create servers, virtualisation can help local councils because they often use more bespoke, specialised applications than most private organisations, said Steve Clark, senior server support assistant for the council. "Local councils have a variety of departments to support from an IT perspective, and it's all fairly specialised and bespoke," he said. "There are some things councils do which no one else does, such as council tax... no one is collecting tax in the private world."

With that in mind, last year the council, which has 700 staff using 500 computers, consolidated its servers using VMware Infrastructure 3, with the aim of reducing hardware, cutting power consumption and lowering heat production.

"We first had about 12 servers on two physical ones, so there's obviously a decent cost savings purely from cutting back on hardware," Clark said. Now, the council has 50 virtual machines running on six physical servers, as well as ten virtual PCs. He said the council's servers are about 60 per cent virtualised, but more will go that way following the natural refresh cycle. "As new things come up, they're put on the virtualised system," he said.

Following the server move, the IT department opted for virtualisation for disaster recovery, as well, eventually choosing Vizioncore's vRanger Pro. Most of the virtual machines are application servers, and therefore backed up weekly. But other virtualised servers house specialised applications for audits and payments, and are backed up daily. Both sets of virtual machine images are stored on a HP 2000s NAS device before being moved to tape. It takes about half an hour to restore a virtualised server, whereas a physical server used to take a day, Clark said.

Clark said the job isn't finished, however, as the system will likely be expanded over the next year. "If we had a proper disaster which took out our data centre, recovery wouldn't be so quick," he said.

The council is also considering virtualising their 500 desktop computers. Currently, a proof-of-concept trial is running on ten PCs, including Clark's. "It doesn't seem to affect me in any way. I never really think: 'I could do this from a PC better'," he said. "The user experience, it's the same... it doesn't require any retraining, so it's ideal from that point of view."

Clark added that it's useful for working from home, as it gives better access to applications. But he said whether the council goes ahead with the system depends how many virtual PCs will work per server - and how efficient it all really turns out to be.

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