Overview

HD Supply is a leading wholesale distribution company, providing a broad range of products and services to professional customers in the infrastructure and energy, maintenance, repair and improvement and specialty construction markets.  With a diverse portfolio of industry-leading businesses, HD Supply is one of the largest diversified wholesale distributors in North America, with approximately 765 locations. 

HD Supply Director of Information Technology Bradford Cowles oversees two enterprise data centers with 540 VMs running on 53 physical ESX hosts, as well as four additional sites with another 20 hosts and 200 VMs for HA. 

Challenge

With approximately 35% of his environment virtualized, Cowles had moved beyond simply virtualizing the low hanging fruit and was getting into critical workload. However, his biggest constraint in the virtual environment was storage I/O from backups, antivirus patches and other routine software. As a result, HD Supply was experiencing I/O storms in the middle of the day. With VCenter, Cowles had very little visibility into his virtual environment. He was looking for a tool that could give him visibility into his I/O bottlenecks so that he could begin to guarantee availability of his mission critical applications.

Solution

Cowles had been introduced to VMTurbo in 2009 and really appreciated its supply chain economics approach to virtualization management. So he decided to run the VMTurbo Monitor and Reporter tools in parallel with Quest VFoglight in order to determine which software would best provide visibility into his I/O bottlenecks. He was pleasantly surprised to find that VMTurbo more than matched the very expensive VFoglight tools.

A holistic platform for proactive and automated management of workload and resources in virtualized data centers, the VMTurbo Virtualization Management Suite optimizes application performance and utilization by balancing workload demand across server and storage infrastructure. It identifies under- and over-utilized physical server and storage capacity and provides corrective actions by considering a broad set of metrics and constraints, such as CPU, memory, network I/O, storage I/O, IOPS, latency, CPU ready queues, ballooning, swapping, clusters, VLANs, LUNs, business policies, etc.

As an early VMTurbo adopter, Cowles collaborated with VMTurbo in the development of its first two applications. Today he is in production with Monitor and Reporter, and is collaborating with VMTurbo on Planner and Optimizer, the other two modules in the VMTurbo Virtualization Management Suite.

"So far the real value for HD Supply is in VMTurbo’s Monitor and Reporter,” said Cowles. “Monitor and Reporter are the number one focus for us and have allowed us to displace more costly software. Together, these tools are collecting the necessary data to do optimization."

Just as Cowles put a freeze on virtualization until he got tools that could provide visibility into bottlenecks and allow HD Supply to increase the stability of its VMs, he also anticipates a huge ROI once HD Supply can begin to optimize its virtual environment.

Supports 10% more VMs within the current infrastructure

“In 2010 we crested the peak of physical servers in our data center,” said Cowles. “We expect to break through to 50% virtualization in 2011 and 75% by 2014. With the virtualization management we have now, on a per virtual basis, we can virtualize 10% more workload, which means we could add 54 more VMs without spending a dime.”

Benefits

• Visibility into storage I/O bottlenecks
• Elimination of I/O storms and
• Stabilization of VM availability
• Continued virtualization of an increasing percentage of mission-critical applications
• Up to 10% increase of VMs without spending a dime
• Ability to take a commodity hypervisor at some point and do something fancy with it
• Ensure vendor diversity within the HD Supply technology stack.