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.