VMware has announced that The City of Calgary has deployed VMware's management and virtualization suite, VMware Infrastructure 3. With VMware, The City is containing spiraling IT costs, accelerating the development of new online services for its one million residents, and helping ensure application availability for The City's 32 business units, such as the Calgary Fire Department, Emergency Medical Services, Finance & Supply, and Water Services.

Before virtualizing its application environment, The City of Calgary had been adding nearly 80 new physical servers each year in its datacenter to handle the ever-increasing volume of electronic data needed to support city operations. The City's IT budget was being stretched by this constant need for more hardware, and The City's IT staff was spending a high number of hours managing, monitoring and provisioning that hardware. Since deploying VMware Infrastructure, The City has retired more than 55 physical hosts.

Currently, an average of 16 virtual machines (VMs) run on each of 16 physical hosts. The entire virtualized datacenter is managed centrally via VMware VirtualCenter, and The City has commoditized its hardware by pre-configuring new physical hosts with template-based virtual machines.

"VMware's tremendous value to our city is reflected in the flexibility it provides," said Ken Johannesson, supervisor of infrastructure provisioning, IT operations, The City of Calgary. "We can provision new VMs up in hours or even minutes as our needs change. It used to take days. We've cut the cost of provisioning an x86 server by 58 percent, which allows us to contain costs while increasing capacity. And, VMware's ability to abstract applications from individual pieces of hardware has simplified server hardware lifecycle refresh and disaster recovery. Moreover, resource pools ensure application reliability in the event that one piece of hardware fails. Without that reliability concern, our team can spend more time working on strategic projects."

Approximately 40 percent of The City's application environment is virtualized today, with nearly 80 percent of these virtualized servers running Windows Server.