ICICI Bank-Virtualization & Consolidation

I CICI Bank has a huge Data center with around 700 servers. The biggest

challenge for them was to stop procurement of new servers as they were running

out of real estate. Other concerns were the power consumption of this data

center, and the need for quick re-deployment of servers in case of any failure.

So they consolidated all their servers by removing old and slow machines and

getting the latest and fastest ones to run virtualization applications to

maximize their output. As a result, they acquired around 39 SUN Fire x4600

Servers with 8 dual core AMD 2.5GHz CPUs, which means in total 16 cores in one

server. The server also has around 32 GB of RAM. Now on each of these 39

servers, VMWare ESX Server was installed. The virtual disks of all the virtual

machines running on these servers are stored centraly on a SAN. They are

accessed over either FC or iSCSI. The management is done through a tool called

VCMS (Virtual Center Management System), which lets a single interface monitor

and manage all the virtual machines.

Total number of virtual machines running in the ICICI data center is around

175, which includes production, UAT and development servers.