WWF-Australia implemented VMware virtualization across its infrastructure to future-proof its aging servers, reduce carbon emissions, and improve efficiency. It consolidated physical servers 2:1, provisioned new servers 50% faster, and reduced management tasks by 70% while stabilizing power consumption. WWF-Australia plans further energy savings through VMware power management and migrating to blade servers.

1. N O T F O R P R O F I T
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C U S T O M E R S N A P S H O T
WWF-Australia
The Australian arm of the world’s largest and most influential conservation
organization, WWF-Australia focuses on eight key areas: climate change, weeds
and feral animals, land and forests, marine protection, species, water management,
sustainable industry and business partnerships. Active in this market since 1978,
WWF-Australia uses rigorous scientific data to underpin its conservation activities.
Running aging and increasingly inflexible server hardware, WWF-Australia decided to
future-proof its infrastructure while reducing its carbon emissions by implementing
virtualization technologies from VMware. “Our decision was reinforced by the
fact WWF organizations in other countries were achieving positive results using
VMware®,” said Semir Hasanbegovic, IT Support Specialist, WWF-Australia. Following
a trial using two or three virtual machines on a single host server, WWF-Australia
turned to VMware partner Enstor to implement virtualization across its production
environment. The organization is now successfully running a 100-user Microsoft
Exchange 2007 email system, Web, file and print servers, and domain controllers, in
25 to 30 virtual machines on a cluster of four host servers. These hosts are connected
by fiber channel to a 3.5TB storage area network divided into LUNs for VMware data
stores and raw device mapping. WWF-Australia is also using VMware’s ESXi bare-
metal hypervisor to run testing and staging.
“We have achieved our goal of reducing our environmental footprint by cutting
our physical server numbers and achieving better memory and processing
capacity utilization on the machines used to run our virtualized infrastructure,” said
Hasanbegovic. “We are also able to deploy new servers much more quickly and
cost-effectively.” The organization is achieving these savings while reducing the
management load on its IT team and providing resources to the business faster than
possible using a physical infrastructure. WWF-Australia is expecting to further lower
its environmental impact when it deploys VMware vSphere™ 4 power management
and thin provisioning in May 2010, with a migration to less energy-intensive blade
servers also planned. “We plan to use VMware Distributed Power Management to
put idle blades into standby mode at times when resource usage is less intensive –
such as weekends and public holidays – and only power them back up again when
demand increases,” said Hasanbegovic. “Combined with the scheduled shift to
blades, we will further contribute to WWF sustainability.”
Results
• Saved in the order of 15% in hardware acquisition costs
• Achieved a server consolidation ratio of 2:1
• Stabilized power and cooling consumption, with UPS not storing more electricity
for use despite a sharp increase in the number of servers deployed
• Provisioned new servers in half a day, a real-time saving of over a week
• Reduced management task by approximately 70%
“WWF-Australia can now conduct
its conservation activities more
efficiently and responsively thanks
to a virtualized infrastructure
based on VMware® technologies.
In addition, we are reducing our
carbon emissions by deploying
less hardware in our datacenter, in
line with the organization’s goal of
operating more sustainably on a
global basis.”
— Semir Hasanbegovic,
IT Support Specialist
WWF-Australia
Challenge
Future-proof the WWF-Australia datacenter
infrastructure while reducing the
organization’s carbon emissions.
Solution
VMware® virtualization has enabled WWF-
Australia’s IT team to contribute to the
organization’s sustainability goals while
improving the delivery of applications and
services to the business.
VMWare at Work
VMware Infrastructure 3, featuring:
• ESX™ 3.5
• VMotion™
• Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)
• High Availability (HA)
VMware vCenter Server
VMware Workstation
VMware ESXi
Deployment environment
• ESX on Sun Fire x4200 servers each with
two dual-core AMD Opteron processors
running at 2.8GHz per core and 16GB RAM
• Compellent SAN with 3.5TB capacity
• Guest operating systems: Microsoft
Windows Server 2003, Microsoft Windows
Server 2008, Ubuntu Linux (85 percent
Windows, 15 percent Linux)
• Virtualized production applications:
Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Web
servers, file and print servers, domain
controllers
KEY HIGHLIGHTS