by Karl McElwain,Technology Director, Banks County School System.
The Banks County School System seeks to provide a challenging academic curriculum that prepares every student for a productive life. In partnership with parents and the greater community, we aspire to foster in every student a desire for lifelong learning, a commitment to personal fitness, an appreciation of the arts, a deep-rooted understanding of right and wrong, and a desire to participate responsibly in a free and democratic society.
The Banks County School System is embraced by a progressive community that supports a quality education for all students. The community has shown support with the passage of three Educational Local Option Sales Taxes (ELOST). This funding has resulted in the completion of a new high school, stadium, field house, state of the art middle school and elementary school, additions to the primary school, and new bus maintenance facility.
Currently, the technology staff includes a Director, Instructional Specialist, and two technicians. Every classroom has 3 to 5 desktops connected to the internet for a total of approximately 1500 nodes.
This is the first year that we have started to virtual servers as a method of reducing hardware maintenance and maximizing our return on our investment.
According to VMWare, Inc. "Virtualization is an abstraction layer that decouples the physical hardware from the operating system to deliver greater IT resource utilization and flexibility.
Virtualization allows multiple virtual machines, with heterogeneous operating systems to run in isolation, side-by-side on the same physical machine. Each virtual machine has its own set of virtual hardware (e.g., RAM, CPU, NIC, etc.) upon which an operating system and applications are loaded. The operating system sees a consistent, normalized set of hardware regardless of the actual physical hardware components."
After monitoring a traditional server, most machines were found to only run at 10% CPU load or less. By migrating to virtual machines we have increased CPU load to 70%. After migrating we realized additional benefits including:
- Reduced Electric Cost
- Reduced Cooling Cost
- Increased Battery Backup Run Time
- Regained Rack Space
- Simplified Backkup and Disaster Recovery
Current Hardware: (Cost $3,000 ~ $4,000):
- SuperMicro 4U Rackmount Server
- Dual Dual Core Processor, AMD Opteron
- 8GB DDR2 SDRAM
- 8 SATA HDD (RAID 10), Hardware RAID
- 10/100/1000 Ethernet
- Windows 2003 Server Standard
- VMWare Server (Free Edition)
Software Running:
- Rennaisance Place (Acc Reader, Acc Math, ect.)
- InfoCentre (Centralized Library Automation)
- Centre SIS (Student Information)
