Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from the VMworld 2011 conference on how one city in California has gained cost and efficiency benefits from virtualization.

1. Fairfield, California Has Used Virtualization to Efficiently
Deliver Crucial City Services
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from the VMworld 2011 conference on how one city in
California has gained cost and efficiency benefits from virtualization.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: VMware
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you
from the VMworld 2011 Conference in Las Vegas. We're here in the week of
August 29 to explore the latest in cloud computing and virtualization
infrastructure developments.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I’ll be your
host throughout this series of VMware-sponsored BriefingsDirect
discussions. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
Our next VMware case study interview focuses on the City of Fairfield,
California and how the IT organization there has leveraged virtualization and cloud-delivering
applications to provide new levels of service in an increasingly efficient manner.
We’ll see how Fairfield, a mid-sized city of 110,000 in Northern California, has taken the do-
more-with-less adage to its fullest, beginning interestingly with core and mission-critical city
services applications.
Please join me now in welcoming Eudora Sindicic, Senior IT Analyst Over Operations in
Fairfield. Welcome to the show, Eudora.
Eudora Sindicic: Thank you. Thank you very much.
Gardner: I'm really curious, why did you choose to move forward with virtualization on your
core applications, mission-critical level applications, things like police support and fire
department support? What made you so confident that those were the right apps to go with?
Sindicic: First of all, it’s always been challenging in disaster recovery and business continuity.
Keeping those things in mind, our CAD/RMS systems for the police center and also our fire
staffing system were high on the list for protecting. Those are Tier 1 applications that we want to
be able to recover very quickly.
We thought the best way to do that was to virtualize them and set us up for future business
continuity and true failover and disaster recovery.
So I put it to my CIO, and he okayed it. We went forward with VMware, because we saw they
had the best, most robust, and mature applications to support us. Seeing that our back end was

2. SQL for those two systems and seeing that we were just going to embark on a brand-new
upgrading of our CAD/RMS system, this was a prime time to jump on the bandwagon and do it.
Also, with our backend storage being NetApp, and NetApp having such an intimate relationship
with VMware, we decided to go with VMware.
Gardner: And how has that worked out?
Snapshotting abilities
Sindicic: It’s been wonderful. We’ve had wonderful disaster recovery capabilities. We have
snapshotting abilities. I'm snapshotting the primary database server and
application server, which allows for snapshots up to three weeks in primary
storage and six months on secondary storage, which is really nice, and it has
served us well.
We already had a fire drill, where one report was accidentally deleted out of
a database due to someone doing something -- and I'll leave it at that. Within
10 minutes, I was able to bring up the snapshot of the records management
system of that database.
The user was able to go into the test database, retrieve his document, and then he was able to
print it. I was able to export that document and then re-import it into the production system. So
there was no downtime. It literally took 10 minutes, and everybody was happy.
Gardner: So you were able to accomplish your virtualization and also gain that disaster
recovery and business continuity benefit, but you pointed out the time was of the essence. How
long did it take you, and was that ahead of schedule, behind schedule? How that affects you in
terms of timing?
Sindicic: In regards to the incident or in regards to the whole project?
Gardner: The project and the implementation.
Sindicic: Back in early fiscal year 2010, I started doing all the research. I probably did a good
nine months of research before even bringing this option to my CIO. Once I brought the option
up, I worked with my vendors, VMware and NetApp, to obtain best pricing for the solution that I
wanted.
I started implementation in October and completed the process in March. So it took some time.
Then we went live with our CAD/RMS system on May 10, and it has been very robust and
running beautifully ever since.

3. Gardner: Tell me about your apparatus, your IT operations, the number of servers, the level of
virtualization that you’re using. Then, we’d like to hear about some of the additional apps you
may be bringing on or have brought on.
Sindicic: I have our finance system, an Oracle-based system, which consists of an Oracle
database server and Apache applications server, and another reporting server that runs on a
different platform. Those will all be virtual OSs sitting in one of my two clusters.
For the police systems, I have a separate cluster just for police and fire. Then, in the regular day-
to-day business, like finance and other applications that the city uses, I have a campus cluster to
keep those things separated and to also relieve any downtime of maintenance. So everything
doesn’t have to be affected if I'm moving virtual servers among systems and patching and doing
updates.
Other applications
We’re also going to be virtualizing several other applications, such as a citizen complaint
application called Coplogic. We're going to be putting that in as well
into the PD cluster.
The version of VMware that we’re using is 4.1, we’re using ESXi
server. On the PD cluster, I have two ESXi servers and on my campus,
I have three. I'm using vSphere 4, and it’s been really wonderful having a good handle on that
control.
Also, within my vSphere, vCenter server, I've installed a bunch of NetApp storage control
solutions that allow me to have centralized control over one level snapshotting and replication.
So I can control it all from there. Then vSphere gives me that beautiful centralized view of all my
VMs and resources being consumed.
It’s been really wonderful to be able to have that level of view into my infrastructure, whereas
when the things were distributed, I hadn’t had that view that I needed. I’d have to connect one by
one to each one of my systems to get that level.
Also, there are some things that we’ve learned during this whole thing. I went from two VLANs
to four VLANs. When looking at your traffic and the type of traffic that’s going to traverse the
VLANs, you want segregate that out big time and you’ll see a huge increase in your
performance.
The other thing is making sure that you have the correct type of drives in your storage. I knew
that right off the bat that IOPS was going to be an issue and then, of course, connectivity. We’re
using Brocade switches to connect to the backend fiber channel drives for the server VMs, and
for lower-end storage, we’re using iSCSI.

4. Gardner: I know you're only a few months into this in terms of being in full production, but in
addition to getting some of these benefits around view and analytics into the operations, do you
have any metrics of success in terms of lowering the total cost of doing this vis-à-vis your
previous physical and distributed approach?
Sindicic: We are seeing cost benefit now. I don’t have all the metrics, but we’ve spun up six
additional VMs. If you figure out the cost of the Dells, because we are a Dell shop, it would cost
anywhere between $5,000 and $11,000 per server. On top of that, you're talking about the cost of
the Microsoft Software Assurance for that operating system.That has saved a lot of money right
there in some of the projects that we’re currently embarking on and for the future.
We have several more systems that I know are going to be coming on line and we're going to
save in cost. We’re going to save in power. Power consumption, I'm projecting will slowly go
down over time as we add to our VM environment.
As it grows and it becomes more robust, and it will, I'm looking forward to a large cost savings
over a 5- to 10-year period.
Better insight
Gardner: So we’ve seen that you've been able to maintain your mission-critical performance
and requirements for these applications. You were able to get better insight into these operations.
You were able to cut your costs. And now you’ve set yourself up for being able to extend that
value into other applications.
Was there anything that surprised you that you didn’t expect, when you moved from the physical
to the virtualized environment?
Sindicic: I was pleasantly surprised, as I said, with the depth of reporting that I could physically
see, the graph, the actual metrics, as we were ongoing. As our CAD system came online into
production, I could actually see utilization go up and to what level.
I was pleasantly surprised to be able to see to see when the backups would occur, how it would
affect the system and the users that were on it. Because of that, we were able to time them so that
would be the least-used hours and what those hours were. I could actually tell in the system when
it was the least used.
It was real time and it was just really wonderful to be able to easily do that, without having to
manually create all the different tracking ends that you have to do within Microsoft Monitor or
anything like that. I could do that completely independently of the OS.
Gardner: So better control management and therefore efficiency, being able to decide when
things should happen in a more efficient manner. Given the fact that you’re a public organization,

5. have compliance or regulatory issues crept in, and has that been something that’s been
beneficial?
Sindicic: Regulatory and compliance is going to creep in. I see that in the future with some of
our applications as that rolls into a virtual environment. We're going to have some compliance
issues, and it’s mostly around encryption and data control, which I really don’t foresee being a
problem with VMware.
They also have a lot of hardening information that I am going to be using and utilizing to harden
not only the OS, but you can also encrypt your VM. So I'm looking forward to doing that.
Gardner: Of course, you’re also in the public service business and you have to provide for your
users who are those people that are then supporting the people in the community, the proactive
public at large. So how has this gone?
Sindicic: Our biggest are our CAD and RMS systems. This is an application that is used in the
laptops on all of the squad cars. And so far so good. Everybody seems to be really happy. The
response of the application is significant. There haven’t been a lot of issues when it comes to
connectivity and response times, all the way down to the unit. So it’s been really nice.
Gardner: That's the right effect I suppose, the right response. We're hearing a lot here at
VMworld about desktop virtualization as well. I don’t know whether you’ve looked at that, but it
seems like you've set yourself up for moving in that direction. Any thoughts about mobile or
virtualized desktops as a future direction for you?
On the horizon
Sindicic: I see that most definitely on the horizon. Right now, the only thing that's hindering us
is cost and storage. But as storage goes down, and as more robust technologies come out around
storage, such as solid state, and as the price comes down on that, I foresee that something
definitely coming into our environment.
Even here at the conference I'm taking a bunch of VDI and VMware View sessions, and I'm
looking forward to hopefully starting a new project with virtualizing at the desktop level.
This will give us much more granular control over not only what’s on the user’s desktop, but
patch management and malware and virus protection, instead of at the PC level doing it the host
level, which would be wonderful. It would give us really great control and hopefully decreased
cost. We’d be using a different product than probably what we’re using right now.
If you're actually using virus protection at the host level, you’re going to get a lot of bang for
your buck and you won't have any impact on the PC-over-IP. That’s probably the way we we'll
go, with PC-over-IP.

6. Right now, storage, VLANing all that has to happen, before we can even embark on something
like that. So there's still a lot of research on my part going on, as well as finding a way to
mitigate costs, maybe trade-in, something to gain something else. There are things that you can
do to help make something like this happen.
Gardner: It certainly sounds like the more you’re able to learn and develop competency and
implementation experience, the more you can then take advantage of some of the other
efficiencies and it's almost as if there is a sort of a snowball effect here around productivity. Is
that a fair characterization?
Sindicic: Most definitely. Number one, in city government, our IT infrastructure continues to
grow as people are laid off and departments want to automate more and more processes, which is
the right way to go. The IT staff remains the same, but the infrastructure, the data, and the
support continues to grow. So I'm trying to implement infrastructure that grows smarter, so we
don’t have to work harder, but work smarter, so that we can do a lot more with less.
VMware sure does allow that with centralized control in management, with being able to
dynamically update virtual desktops, virtual servers, and the patch management and automation
of that. You can take it to whatever level of automation you want or a little in between, so that
you can do a little bit of check and balances with your own eyes, before the system goes off and
does something itself.
Also, with the high availability and fault tolerance that VMware allows, it's been invaluable. If
one of my systems goes down, my VMs automatically will be migrated over, which is a
wonderful thing. We’re looking to implement as much virtualization as we can as budget will
allow.
Gardner: So fewer of those late night calls. That’s important. It's really been impressive to hear
what you’ve been able to do and you are a small-to-medium sized organization and you are on a
tight budget. So congratulations on that.
Sindicic: Thank you very much.
Gardner: We’ve been talking about leveraging virtualization and cloud-delivered applications to
provide higher levels of service in an increasingly efficient manner especially for core
applications.
Join me please and thanking our guest. We’ve been talking with Eudora Sindicic, Senior IT
Analyst Over Operations at Fairfield, California City of about 110,000 folks. Thanks so much,
Eudora.
Sindicic: Thank you.
Gardner: Thanks to our audience for joining this special podcast coming to you from the 2011
VMworld Conference in Las Vegas.

7. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of
VMware-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next
time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: VMware
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from the VMworld 2011 conference on how one city in
California has gained cost and efficiency benefits from virtualization. Copyright Interarbor
Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.
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