I met an IT Manager from one of the smaller banks, as with previous interviews, the manager and the company involved are not mentioned for privacy.

I wanted to talk to him about virtualization, what are his key issues at the moment, what are his objectives, and how do these objectives fit with the business need? We conducted the conversation over lunch last Friday and here are the results, it was informal and apologies to ‘Mike’ if I have missed anything we discussed.

Thanks for doing this, tell me about your server estate.

Sure, we’ve got about 600 windows servers which are running on Dell and HP servers, we’ve recently made the switch to Dell due to price and value, though I’m yet to be convinced, it’s not that there’s anything wrong with them, far from it, they’re working fine and haven’t given us any problems, it’s just that we’ve used Compaq/HP for years so the experience in supporting them is there, and the driver packs, the documentation from HP has always been very good.

We run Windows 2000, we’re about to start a Windows 2003 migration, and in the process tidy up any remaining Windows NT4 boxes, we’ve got a few print servers and a couple of domain controllers that are still in use, they really need replaced.

The servers we support are a mixture of application and infrastructure/market data servers, so we basically look after any Windows server that pings, ensuring that they conform (as close as possible) to the standard build, with the same kind of security/access configurations to ensure maintenance and support is less complicated.

What’s been a challenge for you recently?

Actually it’s been a mixture of things, firstly, security patching, we’ve got 600 servers to deal with, all running on different platforms with different layered components, managing the patching of several versions of Windows, Internet Explorer, Office and SQL is time consuming, it’s not technically difficult, just getting the downtime from everyone, doing adequate testing, and getting people on site can be quite challenging at times. Secondly, would be data center space, I’m not in the data center planning team, but I am aware that we need to be careful with the number of servers we’re putting in, at the moment we’re growing the estate by about 5% a month which we can cope with, but at some point we’re going to have to look at how we provision the servers in the near future, for now it’s not my problem.

What actions have you taken to deal with security patching?

We’ve established a patch window for every server an agreed day during the weekend when the server can be patched and an associated slot, morning, afternoon and evening; the business teams select a slot on a Saturday or a Sunday with morning/afternoon/evening, and the server is patched (ideally) within that time slot.  Also we’ve tried different ways of patching, we’ve ended up using a mixture of SMS and in-house written scripts to achieve this dependent on the server, for example internally SMS is fine, for the market data systems, we use a scripted cdrom, plug the cd in/mount the virtual cd image, and run a script which scans the box and deploys the patches.

You mention data center space not being your problem – is this really the case?

We need to be careful with data center space, but ultimately if we need more space, we’ll just need to get it. We’re driven by what the business wants.

Have you looked at virtualization?

I’m not a big fan of virtualization, I’ve heard too many disaster stories, I don’t like the shared ownership aspect, 1 server with 12 virtual instances? What about downtime/maintenance/changes to the ESX server?

I’d rather wait and watch the technology evolve to something more manageable and stable.

What are you doing to be proactive?

We’ve implemented monitoring of the server hardware using HP Systems Insight Manager (and the Dell equivalent), we’re also at the moment deploying the Microsoft MOM on the servers so that we can monitor the estate more effectively, to try and see where a fault is occurring, to respond to it and prevent it from happening if we can.

Have you been concerned with energy efficiency of the server?

I’m interested, but at the same time, I feel it’s just a marketing ploy to sell more servers and to be honest the business want the fastest systems they can get for their requirement, energy efficiency is a problem for the data center guys, we’ll help where we can, but I’ll leave those kind of issues to the CIO/Data Center guys.

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