Virtualization effort aims at more efficient management of computing power

  • Published
  • By Chuck Paone
  • 66th Air Base Wing Public Affairs
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.