Even before the onset of spring training, Paul Desmond of Network World reports A virtual hit for MLB Advanced Media, that he predicts will play a major role in MLB's new datacenter. According to Desmond, virtualization has enabled MLB Advanced Media director Ryan Nelson to find room in the nearly tapped out datacenter for the introduction of new products that fans will see from the new datacenter in Chicago set to open in time for the 2008 season.

Nelson said that his group began using Solaris Zones to split off server, developer, and quality assurance environments, which prepared the team for the challenge of introducing a chat product during the 2007 season. All of this was accomplished with virtualization in just a few days as opposed to the month or two that importing new iron would have cost.

MLB employed the services of Joyent to scale up its IT infrastructure yet again during the playoffs and World Series. Then, season over, requested that Joyent scale the system back to match the much lower level of post-season utilization. "When I have a need for it, we pay for the utilization. When we don't, we don't. We can turn it up and down as we need to," Nelson told Desmond.

The New York datacenter houses some 100 Sun servers, and the new Chicago datacenter another 130. Nelson said that some 180 of the total will be online by the time things really get going in the 2008 season.

The system will upgrade to the Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS) and switch to newer hardware that has a smaller footprint and lower power requirements.

The capability of Solaris Zones to migrate a zone from one city to another will be invaluable, Nelson noted, come time for the opening of the Chicago datacenter.

Nelson continued that using containers also contributed to a higher state of security in the datacenter, isolating virtual machines from outside intrusion and minimizing the damage someone might be able to inflict.

Virtualization was also making it easier for developers to debug a problem, since Nelson's people can simply clone the production machine where the problem resides and allow the developer to complete the investigation and remedy the problem.

Keeping track of all the hosts under his roof, real and virtual, is a giant administrative problem that Nelson is still not entirely comfortable with. In the absence of potential employees with big-enterprise virtualization experience, Nelson said, the help of Sun Professional Services has been valuable.

In addition to Solaris Zones, Nelson said he could see his shop using xVM as well..."one kernel with a bunch of virtual computing environments underneath it -- and then there's the Xen piece, which is actually booting multiple kernels on big-enterprise hardware," as he puts it. "Virtualization lets us slosh resources around seasonally." [...read more...]

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