VMware is the world’s leading provider of virtualization solutions and services. Through a pioneering virtualization approach, VMware solutions separate the operating system and application software from the underlying hardware – to deliver significant improvements in efficiency, availability, flexibility and manageability.

With a customer base of 20,000+ organizations of midmarket and enterprise customers, VMware delivers technology designed to substantially lower IT costs, provide more flexibility in choosing operating systems and offer a more automated and resilient system infrastructure capable of responding to variable business demands.

VMware’s broad and proven suite of virtualization solutions addresses a wide range of complex IT challenges that include disaster recovery, business continuance, high availability, infrastructure optimization, desktop management, and improved manageability and control. Our solutions enable organizations to aggregate multiple servers, storage infrastructure and networks together into shared pools of capacity that can be allocated dynamically, securely and reliably to applications as needed, increasing hardware utilization and reducing equipment, power, cooling and real estate costs.

VMWARE’S 3 PRIMARY PRODUCT CATEGORIES:

• Virtualization Platforms. These desktop and server products include a broad platform, ranging from free entry-level products to the most robust, feature-rich platforms.
• Virtual Infrastructure Automation. Utilizing the unique benefits of our platforms, these products automate system infrastructure services, such as resource management, availability, mobility and security.
• Virtual Infrastructure Management. These products automate the interaction between various IT constituencies and the virtual infrastructure – to create a specific set of point solutions that range from capacity sizing and assessment to managing software development labs.

VMware also provides professional services and support through VMware teams and via hundreds of authorized partner organizations in 40 countries, including proactive, top-quality customer support, consulting services to accelerate virtualization implementations and extensive education services for building in-house expertise.

Challenge

Having to support a vast array of operating systems, Bowdoin College was running out of space and resources in its data center, and also lacked a disaster recovery plan.

Solution

Using VMware Infrastructure 3, Bowdoin College has partnered with Loyola Marymount University on the West Coast to build a co-located data center, boasting cross-country disaster recovery.

VMware at Work

VMware Infrastructure 3 Enterprise, featuring:

• ESX Server 3 with Virtual Machine File System (VMFS)
• VirtualCenter 2
• VMotion
• Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)
• High Availability (HA)

Deployment Environment

• ESX Server on HP BL20pG2 and BL25p Blades
• VirtualCenter on HP DL385G2
• Network appliances: 3020C for iSCSI VMFS volumes and R200 for NFS shares
• Guest operating systems: Windows 2003, 2000, and XP, RedHat, Debian, FreeBSD, Solaris10
• Applications: Microsoft Cluster, print, Active Directory and Terminal Services, Blackboard, Microsoft IIS5 and 6, Apache, Tomcat, Microsoft SQL 2000 and 2005, MySQL, Oracle, CMS, Remedy, Altiris, digital asset managers, Exchange, Sophos antivirus, WSUS, KeyServer, OneCard system

Bowdoin College

Founded in 1794, Bowdoin College is a private liberal arts college located in Brunswick, Maine. It is consistently ranked among the top 10 liberal arts colleges, with approximately 1,800 students, and 800 faculty and staff.

Prior to implementing VMware technology, the college had no viable disaster recovery (DR) plan.

“Individual servers were backed up to tape, which was then stored in another building on campus,” says Tim Antonowicz, senior systems engineer at Bowdoin, “but we had no remote storage. In the event of a catastrophic failure, it would have taken weeks – if not months – to recover.”

Today Bowdoin College, and Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, Calif., have formed a business partnership to inexpensively provide an enterprise-class crosscountry disaster recovery and business continuity solution using VMware Infrastructure 3.

Results

• Reliable disaster recovery with ability to replicate virtual machines across the country to a hot site hosted by another educational institution;
• Continued to grow IT capabilities without increasing footprint of data center;
• Achieved higher availability, better load balancing and enhanced fault tolerance with more than 70 percent of environment virtualized;
• Co-located emergency Web, DNS and active directory servers;
• Critical systems are now DR-ready;
• Avoided $500,000 in hardware costs, now with 100+ virtual machines in more than 10 ESX hosts; and
• Saved $15,000 in annual server maintenance.