A Strategy for Adopting Server Virtualization in the Public Sector: NIPA Computer Center

Many public organizations have been adopting and operating various servers. These servers run on Windows, Unix, and Linux operating systems that generally use less than 10% of their capacity. For migrating a public organization to cloud computing, we must first virtualize the server environment. This article proposes a strategy for server virtualization that the National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA) has done and describes the effects of a public organization migrating to cloud computing. The NIPA Computer Center planned an effective virtualization migration on various servers. This project of virtualization migration was conducted with the existing policy of separate x86 servers and Unix servers. There are three popular approaches to server virtualization: a virtual machine model, a paravirtual machine model, and virtualization at the operating system layer. We selected a VMware solution that uses the virtual machine model. We selected servers for virtualization in the following manner. Servers were chosen that had the highest rate of service usage and CPU usage and had been operating for five years or more. However, we excluded servers that require 80% or greater rates of CPU usage. After adopting the server virtualization technique, we consolidated 32 servers into 3 servers. Virtualization is a technology that can provide benefits in these areas: server consolidation and optimization, infrastructure cost reduction and improved operational flexibility, and implementation of a dual computing environment.