Virtualization for Dummies

April 3rd, 2008 by Louis DiMeglio

Although I poke a little fun at the decision to hand-out “Virtualization for Dummies” to government IT folks at the FOSE conference (see me in the video below or click here), I did think the session on implementing virtualization was very good.

I was impressed with the two specific government projects that were discussed during the session. The first, an army project that took place at the Pentagon took the square footage used by the data center from nearly 140,000 to under 8,000. That’s server consolidation par excellence!

The second project was undertaken by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and instead of focusing on consolidation, the goal was to use virtualization to achieve nearly 100% availability and reliability for high-profile applications used by a mobile workforce.

Two very different goals, but both effectively solved by virtualization.

Until this session, it wasn’t clear to me that there was anywhere in the government that was on the cutting edge of virtualization, but these two projects really do seem to be. I’m glad the FOSE folks were able to get speakers who worked on two such different, but significant virtualization projects to share their lessons learned with the audience.

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April 3rd, 2008