Vocational School G18

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Keeping a growing network of computers up and running at the Vocational School G18 was no small feat. What with limited financial resources to replace and update equipment and the machines’ punishing workloads, administrators faced an imposing challenge. Day-to-day support was demanding for two reasons: all PCs’ removable hard disks, which were swapped in and out regularly and pupils had to configure their own machines at the start of each lesson.

The school decided on a virtualization solution based on a combination of Sun and VMware technology. A virtualized desktop environment would lower costs, simplify management, and improve flexibility. Sun partner and systems integrator, TargoSoft IT-Systemhaus GmbH, helped the school design and implement the new platform, and took advantage of Sun’s Try and Buy program to reduce the project’s hardware costs.

Edgar Landsiedel, department head at the Vocational School G18, says, "The requirements for the IT systems in our school are higher than in the average business. With virtual machines, numerous vocational situations — for example, the setting up and administration of whole networks — are much easier during training than with physical computers.”

The school put Sun Fire X4600 M2 server and Sun StorageTek 2540 array technology at the center of a test environment running VMware ESX 3.5 Server software. TargoSoft tested two server/storage combinations, the first of which consisted of a Sun Fire X4600 M2 server containing eight dual-core AMD Opteron processors and 32 GB of RAM within a small footprint. The server connected to a Sun StorageTek 2540 array with 12 hard disks containing 146 GB of memory. VMware Lab Manager was installed on a normal workstation running Windows Server 2003.

The second design featured the same storage solution and a Sun Fire X4600 M2 server with eight quad-core AMD Opteron processors and 64 GB of RAM. This time the physical log-on and administration server was also omitted and managed virtually using VMware Lab Manager 3.0 Beta — which meant pupils could access any configuration from any PC or laptop after typing a Lab Manager address into their Web browsers.

Landsiedel pushed the server’s 64 GB of RAM to its limits by running 60 virtual machines. He says, “Our findings show that if we wanted to deliver 120 virtual machines for our advanced operating systems course, VMware ESX Server would need to run on a Sun Fire X4600 M2 server with 32 cores and 128 to 256 GB of RAM.”

The tests showed that a virtualized environment made scaling far easier and more cost effective. Instead of having to replace hardware on both servers and PCs, administrators had simply to make changes to the central Sun server. “The era of replaceable hard disks for training purposes or for data storage was therefore finally over,” says Wolfgang Wündsch, project manager at TargoSoft.