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.