Exploring Virtualization Once Again

We were the first wave adopters of virtualization technologies and the leading VM provider has been our choice for standardized virtualization platform across the platform. We had evaluated other proprietary and opensource platforms at that point in time but found them behind on the maturity curve of the new technology.

- Jignesh Vania

Today, virtualization is a mature technology platform and though market leader still maintains the lead, other products have caught up on functionality and stability with mature standards. In line with the nature of our business, we have a geographically and functionally distributed architecture across our Ports and Cargo Terminals. We are standardized on Unix for Database tier and Linux / Windows for application and web tiers. Maintaining the leading proprietary virtualization platform across the large installation was becoming unwieldy and expensive. While the premium on stability meant that we were hardly using the cutting-edge feature list that we were buying. While putting up infrastructure for our latest port, we decided it was time to look at other solutions once again after almost a decade, as other alternatives have matured.

We picked up a couple of proprietary and a couple of opensource solutions. The objective criteria we set for ourselves were:

1. Ease of deployment & maintenance: We have an outsourced IT services model and we were paying both for deployment and maintenance with skilled people even scarcer at remote port locations. Our workloads were standardized across 2 – 3 platforms and we looked at templatized deployment. Direct support from vendor was also a key criterion as we had experienced the value of deep expertise at crunch times and knew that it is not feasible for service providers to invest in the same. This was one of the reasons we had decided to stay away from opensource in our previous evaluation.