VMware, Inc. (NYSE:VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced that the city of Aurora, Colorado, has selected VMware’s industry-leading management and virtualization suite, VMware Infrastructure 3, as the platform for more than 20 applications, including mission-critical systems for the city’s police and fire department.
Aurora, the third largest city in Colorado with over 300,000 residents, provides its residents a progressive approach toward information technology. Residents have access to dozens of online services, underscoring the importance of IT resiliency, scalability and flexibility.
This issue was brought into sharp relief when in 2007 over 40 servers were at end of life. With limited resources, it was determined that it was time to look to more innovative ways to work the annual replacement cycle. The city made a strategic decision to virtualize its infrastructure, giving it more flexibility to move virtual machines (VMs) across physical hosts to help ensure the uninterrupted delivery of services to city residents.
“It was clear that our hardware-based approach to IT had to change,” said Steve Jenovai, senior systems administrator for the city of Aurora. “We simply can’t afford downtime in our infrastructure, and budgetary realities make it impossible to just throw money at the situation. Thanks to VMware, we’ve been able to consolidate 70 boxes down to five, with each box running close to 20 VMs. It has simplified system management dramatically while eliminating downtime and saving taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Jenovai noted that provisioning of new VMs could be done in minutes, compared to the two weeks that used to be required for ordering, installing and configuring a physical server. This has helped the city become much more responsive to changing demands from residents. Likewise, VMware VMotion technology has been extremely valuable in helping ensure application availability by allowing the IT staff to move VMs during routine maintenance of physical hosts or when problems arise. And, VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) helps ensure outstanding performance by dynamically adding or reducing resources for specific applications as demand ebbs and flows.
“We took a long look at all virtual server offerings,” said Jenovai. “It quickly became a very easy decision. VMware provides a true virtualization solution, not just a hypervisor. VMware gives us a mature toolset, centralized manageability, DR capabilities and OS independence. We didn’t find any other virtualization offerings that could match it. And the fact that we could achieve 100-percent ROI in 90 days was phenomenal. And that’s just from hardware savings. We’ve also reduced power consumption and space requirements.”
Approximately 90 percent of the city’s application environment is Windows-based, with the remaining applications running on Linux. The city’s virtualized applications include a mission-critical mobile application for police and fire officers, a self-serve GIS mapping system for residents, Remedy Help Desk, Blackberry Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Stellent document management, and payment and permit processing applications.
“Before we bought from VMware, we talked to a number of customers,” said Jenovai. “We didn’t hear one negative comment. VMware’s platform is a singularly unique software solution that actually performs as well or better than advertised.”