Virtualization effort
aims at more efficient management of computing power
By Chuck Paone
66th Air Base Wing Public Affairs
12/9/2009 - HANSCOM AIR FORCE BASE, Mass. -- An
Electronic Systems Center pilot project will help officials here
evaluate the full potential of virtualization, which allows
computer resources such as memory, processing, network and disk
space to be partitioned and efficiently redistributed.
This virtualization pilot is relatively small, but 653rd
Electronic Systems Wing Enterprise Integration Division
officials are betting on big dividends. The initiative is being
conducted in the center's C4ISR Enterprise Integration Facility,
known as the CEIF, and represents a new way of doing business,
according to project leader Peter Walsh.
"It allows CEIF
administrators to more easily manage computing power, treating
systems as a scalable, on-demand resource," he said.
The
CEIF is used by center officials and others for development
efforts and hosting exercises, including national and
international participants in the huge annual Coalition Warrior
Interoperability Demonstration (CWID), where they test and
advance technologies in a realistic, integrated environment.
The project will allow CEIF personnel to rapidly respond to
user's IT needs. Machines, networks and storage can be created
as needed within the virtual environment and managed centrally.
Configurations and systems also can be taken off-line and saved
after use to free resources for the next customer.
A
virtualized infrastructure represents the physical resources of
the entire IT environment, aggregating computers, storage and
networks into a unified pool of resources, according to Ray
Smith, an administrator on the implementation team. Resources
are then delivered dynamically and securely, offering higher
levels of utilization, availability and automation.
With
the right implementation, down time can also be eliminated, Mr.
Smith said.
A key factor in the recent success of
virtualization is the speed with which vendors such as VMware
and Red Hat have advanced the technology, said Mr. Smith. An
extension to the operating system known as a hypervisor can now
be loaded onto any operation center computers that will be part
of the pool of available resources. It then reports data on
performance and functionality back to a central management
console.
An administrator, monitoring this server via the
management console, can see all the resources available and
allocate those resources on a per-customer basis.
"I can
just right-click and say, 'build a new machine,' and it will go
out to the hypervisor and build it," Mr. Smith said.
The
ability for administrators to pool resources and parcel them out
to users as requested keeps old hardware viable longer and makes
maintenance extremely easy, he said.
Plus, just as with
real estate, building to suit, rather than offering only what's
already built, provides a more ideal solution, and the
efficiency is clear. But the pilot initiative also offers CEIF
customers another major advantage.
"A user can walk in
with a disc image that he's already built using this software,"
Mr. Smith said. "That gives him a way to just bring one DVD and
start working."
Plugging in the DVD, effectively just a
copy of the user's own hard drive, that user can boot up and run
the exact system he'd be running at his home location.
Previously, he'd have had to build and configure the system from
scratch in the CEIF.
"This is a capability that users
have started asking for, and now we're going to be able to give
it them," Mr. Smith said.
The pilot, led by Prime
contractor NPLACE and subcontractor Jackpine Technologies, also
accounts for varied user needs. Microsoft, Solaris and Linux
operating systems can all be run on the virtualization software.
A lot of the hardware currently being used for the pilot is
three-year old equipment left idle by a moribund program. The
virtualization project takes all the capability offered by this
equipment, which might otherwise have been discarded, and
extends its useful life, making it part of a larger aggregate.
"So we're reusing equipment and pooling its capacity through
software that allows us to right-size every box the user needs,"
Mr. Smith said.
Because of the relatively limited
investment, not every CEIF user will immediately be able to take
advantage of this capability. However, assuming the capability
gets built out over time - and the pilot work has been designed
so that it can easily be expanded - it's conceivable that most
work there eventually can take advantage of the significant
savings that come with reducing the space, power and cooling
requirements required to run the facility.
The first test
of this new capability will come later this month when MITRE
officials host a Technical Exchange Meeting in which they will
bring their systems to the CEIF on DVDs and portable drives.
Many other users are lining up, as well, and the next CWID
interoperability trials will test this capability in earnest in
June.
"We're excited to see how users react and to be
able to chart the gains from this more efficient use of
computing resources," Mr. Smith said.