Located in the South West Region of Western Australia, the Shires of Dardanup, Harvey, and Donnybrook/Balingup are government councils incorporating over 30,000 people and over 25 suburbs and localities. In order to serve the population’s needs, the local councils oversee the libraries, recreation centers, and administrative offices—taking care of forms, taxes, and a multitude of other duties and projects.
Stephen Eaton, Information Technology Officer of the Shires of Dardanup, Harvey, and Donnybrook/Balingup, maintains three sites ranging from 60 to 70 users at the Harvey council offices, 45 users at Dardanup, and 20 to 25 at Donnybrook/Balingup. Each council has its own data center and a network of remote locations from which users can log in. Faced with a growing need for servers, a limited budget, and a heterogenous data center with Linux and Windows, Eaton began looking at virtualization in order to cut costs, save time, and provide disaster recovery and high availability for his terminal servers. “The main issue we had was power,” said Eaton. “We had been experiencing power outages and would end up with corrupted data and have to take down one of our servers.” Additionally, the Shires needed more servers in their data center. “I was looking to buy new servers for each council,” said Eaton. “And I realized virtualization would significantly help decrease the amount of hardware needed for our terminal set up as well as assist in streamlining deployment with multiple operating systems.”
In the spring of 2007, the Shires deployed Citrix XenServer after a one-month trial. Although Eaton had contemplated using VMware, the price and features of XenServer won him over.
Eaton has also been part of the open source community for the past 15 years and tries to implement open source products whenever possible. “I was looking for an equivalent of the enterprise-level VMware product and had read about Xen. Citrix XenServer offered the best of the open source hypervisor along with a strong feature-set.”
Aside from cost considerations, Eaton also wanted a virtualization tool with enough functionality to fulfill the Shires’ needs to virtualize both Linux and Windows servers. To do this, Eaton chose to go with two Dell 2950 servers each with two Intel quad core Xeons.
Eaton has been very pleased with the solid results virtualization has offered the Shires. “Virtualization allows me to continue providing necessary services to the councils and enables their staff to continue providing services to the community, without buying more hardware and with a fail-safe system in place.”
It took less than a month to set up all three councils, and now the consolidation phase has begun. “I’ve moved services to their own virtual servers, so now we have a dedicated print server, and a dedicated main controller. I wouldn’t have been able to do this before XenSource because we didn’t have the physical resources.”
The Shires first benefited from virtualization by reducing the number of servers needed while providing greater service. “Server consolidation with Citrix XenServer has been fantastic,” said Eaton. “If I need to take a virtual server down I just bring a VM up on another server and there’s no downtime.”
“And there’s been a huge savings in time as far as provisioning goes,” said Eaton. “Whereas before we’d have to build up images from scratch and provision, now I have, for example, a SYSPREP'd image of Windows 2003 Enterprise, and I just make a copy of the pristine image and bring it on line from there.”
Currently, Eaton has provisioned four to five virtual machines and has been able to migrate the Exchange server, domain controllers, print server, and terminal server. He also has been able to allocate fewer resources to the terminal server without any issues. Most importantly, Eaton has a failover system in place. “That was one of the main reasons I wanted to virtualize,” he notes. “I wanted to have back up terminal servers in case a server went down, and now I’ve got them—virtualized.”
Adopting XenServer has also resulted in better system performance now that each task is paired with a dedicated virtual machine. “Our records management was getting a bit long in the tooth,” said Eaton. “The performance and flexibility we now have is a huge benefit.”
Eaton has been pleased with the ease of deployment as well as the support he has received from Citrix. The Shires of Dardanup, Harvey, and Donnybrook/Balingup have recently updated to Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition v4 which includes management for live relocation with XenMotion, which has added functionality to the Shires’ disaster recovery plan and has enabled them to evolve with their communities’ needs. Although they have been in virtualization mode for only a short amount of time, Eaton concludes, “There have been a number of benefits including saving money and power in our data centers. We expect to continue saving on hardware, and be able to take advantage of the numerous product features available in the latest release of XenServer Enterprise Edition.”
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