How to build a subsidized virtualization service

Dave Zavatsondhzavatson@ucdavis.edu

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Virtualization Overview

• Benefits are well known – Savings in • Space• Power• Deployment time, management overhead, ….

• Virtualization as a service deployed June 2009

• June 2010 we had grown to 156 guests

• Subsidy approved for $150,000 June 2010

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Develop a Pricing Model

• Identify all associated costs• Housing• Staff• Security• Training• Hardware/licenses

• Project expected utilization

• Determine service headroom• How long does it take to order additional equipment?• What triggers new order?

• Secure startup funds• Unused equipment reserves

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UCD Pricing

• Pricing by memory allocation• $28.50/GB/month• 2GB server $690 / year• Dedicated CPU available

• Pricing break-even based on 57% utilization• As we get more servers, surge margin will be smaller

percentage of total memory and expected utilization will go up

• Review costs and charges frequently• Pass on lower hardware costs to customers

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Pricing

• 1 hour setup time per server $77.50 / hr• Only charged in unusual circumstances

• Disk space (annual) • SATA $3.15 / GB • FC $6.82 / GB

• 10% of disk space is reserved for snapshots

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Architecture

• Dell M1000 blade chassis

• B710 intel blades with 144GB RAM

• EMC CX4-240 with FC and SATA drives• OS drive must be FC

• Vsphere Enterprise

• Target service was higher end, high availability• Entry level or tiered service was discussed and dismissed

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Compare to Departmental Server

• Dell Optiplex 2GB $1,300

• Amortize over 3 years: • $433 yearly cost• Department owns the equipment and can run it past its

useful lifecycle.

• Costs don’t make service worthwhile• (Remember 2GB virt server is $690 / year)

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What departments overlook

• Equipment lifecycle management

• Deployment time

• High availability

• Backups – recovery time

• Labor, security, housing

• Networking

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What departments don’t care about

• Space• Space is free• We already have space• I can keep it under my desk

• Power• Power is free• Power is centrally managed and paid for• Buildings have metering, but are shared with many

departments

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TANSTAAFL

• Power cost for a server• 250W• $0.085 / kWHr• 1.5 PUE• Lbs CO2 per KWHr 0.725

• Each server uses 3,300 kWHr costing $280 and emitting 1.0 tonnes of CO2 annually

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Those were conservative

• More liberal numbers• 300 W• $0.12 / kWHr• 1.7 PUE• Lbs CO2 per KWHr 0.725

• 4,500 kWHr costing $540 and emitting 1.5 tonnes of CO2 annually

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Determine Costs and Savings

• Power Costs• Might take multiple calls to facilities folks to get the right

person

• Determine PUE• Impossible to do without metering, studies, or consultants• Used SDSC study as a reference

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CO2 Reductions

• PGE has kWHr to CO2 conversion on web

• Standard conversions are available at http://www.climateregistry.org/resources/docs/protocols/grp/GRP_3.1_January2009.pdf page 95

• UC has a mandated CO2 reduction goal. Virtualization contributes greatly to that goal.

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Calculate space savings

• UCD is short on server room space

• 30 to 1 virtualization ratio means 180 servers in 10U – four racks saved

• Real Estate Services can provide market rate

• Each rack uses 30-40 sqft

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Subsidy Justification (based on 108 guests)

• Avoided power usage 338,355 kWHr

• Power cost savings $29,000 ($5,752 per host)

• CO2 savings 111 metric tons

• 60-80 sqft space saved (2 racks)

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Get Support

• Who pays the utility bill?• Facilities endorsement

• Environmental Stewardship• Energy Savings, CO2 reduction are campus goals• UCD has AVC of environmental stewardship• Helped with language for proposal

• Client Feedback

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Server Room Governance

• Server Room long range planning committee

• Server Room Space Evaluation Committee

• Provost mandate to review all server room retrofits

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Subsidy

• $150,000 over three years

• Working on implementation details – goal is to keep costs the same for clients over 3 years

• Need to project utilization over next 3 years

• Will either charge percentages to client and subsidy account or just lower costs overall

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Subsidy

• Plan is to apply subsidy to overall rate• Problem is that higher memory systems don’t save as

much power

• Yearly evaluation of program

• Need to project yearly growth to apply subsidy evenly and keep rates the same each year

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Backups

• SAN snapshots included for free

• Host based backups available via netbackup• License costs high

• Other products considered • Vranger• Veeam

• Other products cheaper, but required two backup interfaces

• Advantage are file-based, LAN free backups

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Other Services

• NAS• EMC NS40G• Highly available• Fully integrates with AD• Snapshots integrated with explorer

• Disaster Recovery• Will host images for future use• Alternate site at UCDMC• Foundry Serveriron Load Balancer

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Accounting

• Service is 100% cost recovery

• Charge internal and external clients

• Built billing database using mysql, snmp

• Daily snapshot of disk usage and available systems

• Electronic billing of clients

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Other Efforts

• Server room build out approval process

• Server room space inventory – 46,000 sqft

• Passing power costs onto departments• Stanford model

• Server buy back program• Six year old 80 node cluster donated to UCD

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Lessons learned

• People don’t care about green when they have to foot the bill for it

• Use fast disk for OS• FC gives us ~4 x performance over SATA

• Don’t let people undersize their systems• Cheap clients cause swapping and disk IO

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Resources

• SAICF http://saicf.ucdavis.edu

• SRSEC http://srsec.ucdavis.edu

• Virtualization Service http://virtualization.ucdavis.edu

• Resources http://virtualization.ucdavis.edu/documents.cfm

• Dave Zavatson• dhzavatson@ucdavis.edu 530-752-7758