WebCentral reveals capacity to run 653 virtual machines

The environment is said to be contained in eight VMware Infrastructure DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler) and HA (High Availability) Clusters, which are using a combination of VMware ESX 3.5 and VMware ESXi 3.5 Installable servers.

The 653 virtual servers in production are hosted on 36 IBM LS41 blade servers and 13 IBM HS21XM blade servers.

The clusters are distributed across three of WebCentral’s data centres, the company said.

The deployment has not only enabled WebCentral to launch an on-demand service to customers, but also to cut back on the amount of physical infrastructure in the data centres.

It is said to have reduced the number of racks required in the data centre by 20 to realise significant space efficiencies, eliminated 1,200 spinning disk drives and removed five tonnes of IT equipment.

WebCentral first undertook a pilot of VMware technology in 2006.

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