PUNE, INDIA: Working out the AMC (Annual Maintenance Charges) mathematics has just got a little easier for Raghuvir Singh Sohal, manager-MIS, Bajaj Auto.

He credits this to the recent implementation of virtualization of the company's IT resources. "As a hardware gestates, its AMC costs increases, and so does its utilization challenge. Now be it shutting off of obsolete hardware, or calculation of AMCs or replication to new hardware or managing full-life applications, everything has turned smooth with a virtualized environment of resource allocation, as he shares with CyberMedia News.

Earlier, sharing his experiences at a VMware event, he talked about the benefits he has gained with the implementation at the Auto major that operates three data centres, including a primary data centre and a co-located server.

"To provide the IT resources required to support business growth, we relied on acquiring new physical servers. But when their number in the primary data centre increased, we released that we would soon be out of space. We then mulled alternative infrastructure options and engaged VMware in April 2007. Then we started analyzing how can we use VMware for server consolidation. We found that we were not utilizing hardware to full extent. Many devices were old and difficult to maintain. After we tried out this new environment, we got convinced that this is our future."

By May 2009, the company is now running most of its applications from an infrastructure at its primary datacenter compromising 30 virtual machines.

As to the key benefits derived after virtualization, he points out that the number of racks required have reduced from four to one, while server provisioning time has come down from two months that was required to procure a physical machine to one day now. "Centralised management of infrastructure, ability to migrate a virtual machine from a compromised server to a properly running machine with no downtime are some other benefits. Also, the fleet power and cooling costs have come down considerably." Sohal shared.

The Physical to Virtual (P2V) is another good function, he adds. "Two to three hours was the maximum downtime while migrating our own servers to virtual set up. After ten to 12 migrations, we got very confident and it has been a true success story."