Siemens PLM Software India : Virtualizing UNIX Platforms

The company uses Windows and UNIX platforms extensively. For running its
products on these platforms the company had to heavily invest on purchasing
hardware for various platforms. For proprietary UNIX platforms such as AIX,
HP-UX and SUN Solaris, the hardware required was comparatively expensive than
Intel. Also the proprietary UNIX hardware when compared to x86 based machines
deliver high compute power that remains under-utilized while running a single
instance of operating system on a single box. Considering budget constraints and
the need for infrastructure consolidation, the company realized there was a need
to explore technologies that would allow them to utilize the hardware to be used
for running more instances of software. As a solution to the challenge it was
decided to use UNIX virtualization technologies with which a single UNIX
hardware could be used to run multiple instances of virtual operating systems.
The company chose to leverage IBM's Virtual IO Server (VIOS) and HP Integrity
Virtual Machines (IVM) for their IBM AIX and HP-UX OSes. Using these
virtualization software on respective hardware was believed to be a very complex
and expensive proposition by a customer. But contrary to this thought, after
doing this implementation, the company realized it wasn't that expensive
considering the cost benefits that are being reaped in the form of
infrastructure consolidation, better provisioning and manageability of resources
and also in form of cost containment. This project is specially beneficial to
software developers who use virtual instances for their day to day development
work.