ICICI Bank : Enterprise Server Virtualization

With rapidly growing servers within the four walls of a datacenter, it's
imperative for banks to have a strategy to do more with less and consequently
save on power and real estate costs. Consolidation of servers in a virtualized
environment is the right strategy to address this. Further, consolidation and
virtualization is required to weed out the old and low configuration servers
from the datacenter and replace them with the latest high end technology servers
(dual core , quad core etc).

At the ICICI datacenter, majority of the physical servers are installed with
Windows OS. They decided to implement VMware as the virtualization layer on top
of the OS to reduce the number of servers currently available and also to reduce
the need to procure more Windows servers. Plus, there was a huge incentive on
savings on power and cooling requirements, and also on real estate. 54 VMWare
ESX servers (Base server) have been installed till date. Out of these 43 ESX
VMware servers have been implemented at the primary site in Mumbai and 11 ESX
servers at the DR site in Hyderabad, hosting around 550 virtual servers which
includes production, standby, UAT & development servers.