Intel Modular Blade Chassis Virtualization Project

An existing client, a medium school district consisting of a high school, middle school, elementary school, a district office, and other assorted district buildings, had purchased an Intel Modular Server Chassis in the summer of 2009. The original configuration of the server included 6 Intel Compute Modules populated with 16GB of RAM, roughly 530GB of disk space in the on-board SAN, dual switches, and 4 redundant power supplies. In addition to the modular system a dual node HP LeftHand storage appliance was installed as part of the infrastructure. The original design was for the Modular system to host virtual servers as well as virtual desktops. Due to existing infrastructure constraints the original technician performing the installation reconfigured the servers to act as physical servers and not run in a virtual environment.

The client requested that the original design of the system be implemented, so I proposed a process by which we would be able to consolidate the servers and re-establish the virtual environment as well as increasing the available memory of the compute modules to 32 GB, and adding another 6 TB of storage to the on-board SAN.

The first step was to re-establish one of the compute modules as a virtual host. This was accomplished by taking a separate standalone server running Server 2008 R2 and making it a virtual host. Then one of the compute modules that was running Server 2003 as a print server was migrated over to the standalone server which freed up the compute module (or blade). Then the blade was reinstalled with Server 2008 Enterprise x64 and configured as a virtual host. Then each blade that was configured as a physical server was converted into a virtual server using the Disk2VHD utility from Microsoft. After each blade was converted from a physical server to virtual, the blade was reinstalled with Server 2008 Enterprise x64 and configured as a virtual host.

Once all virtual servers were completed then virtual workstations were created for use in computer labs district wide.

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