Mallesons had already been running VMware's GSX Server product in a test environment and had two key staff that had become proficient in the technology.
So a rollout only required VMware's input at the design stage of the rollout.
"We started with 30 racks [in our datacentres] and now we are down to 21 and at our smaller in-office sites we have gone from one and a half racks to only a half, which has allowed us to give space back to the business," Behringer said.
A reduction in racks has also seen the firm's power and air-conditioning costs drop dramatically, according to Swindale, and virtualisation has allowed Mallesons to spread workloads across its server stack, providing better load sharing, redundancy and uptime at all hours of the day. It has also contributed to the firm's objective of lessening its impact on the environment.
"The migration occurred over 12 months and was primarily done by two staff members over various weekend outage windows," Swindale said.
Swindale added that some servers in the past did not warrant failover at all, but by using ESX the IT team was able to offer redundancy for everything on Mallesons' system.
Furthermore, using the VMotion technology packed into the ESX offering -- which lets users move live virtual machines to other hosts -- Mallesons has been able to realise better levels of application availability.
"VMotion also means we can take a virtual copy of a server before we do an upgrade, which gives us an easy point of rollback if, at any time, something were to go wrong -- this has already saved us a lot of time."
"We recently did an Active Directory upgrade to 2003, which we ended up holding up until we deployed our ESX Infrastructure because we could realise some benefits in getting all of our domain controllers onto the virtual infrastructure before we even started the upgrade," Swindale said.
"In the end this saved us time -- it gave us a very quick rollback plan if any of the upgrades and patching failed. And today, it continues to give us a very quick recovery should any of the monthly security updates fail."
Future upgrades, using VMware's ESX VI3, which includes new high-availability functions, are now being investigated by the IT department at Mallesons, according to Swindale, for its ongoing replacement of old servers to new virtualised hosts.
"We already have new applications earmarked for virtualisation, especially now that we no longer have to go through lengthy business cases for purchasing a new server each time it is required," Swindale said.
"Every time a new application is requested that requires a new server deployment, we can deploy that new server in six minutes, and at little cost, whereas previously we had to justify each physical server.
"The only hitch we have had is that we realised we needed to put processes in place to mitigate against the risk of a proliferation of these virtual server deployments -- it was just too easy.
"A business case is still required to prove to us that a new server is required for a new application, but the time to implement and deploy has been drastically reduced."
2%
4%
Same old self created problems due to interwoven well constructed $MS dependencies, patches that break things and the "one app on one server" mentality that is all so nesessary when using windows server. Sounds very much like they needed to step up to Unix / linux rather than shift the issues to an alternative platform.
And think of the real savings if open source was introduced into the equation....