Need your IT infrastructure to be highly responsive while on a tight budget in a worldwide environment? Virtualization, and specifically VMware, is the key says James Houston Sr., director of enterprise infrastructure services at West Pharmaceutical Services (http://www.westpharma.com/na/en/Pages/default.aspx).

West Pharmaceutical is a global manufacturer of drug delivery systems, mostly focused on injectable drugs such as insulin with two divisions: pharmaceutical  packaging and pharmaceutical delivery. With headquarters in Philadelphia, it supports partners and customers from 50 locations worldwide. Many of those are small manufacturing facilities supplying national or local markets in various parts of the world.

The result is a company that has some of the challenges of large global enterprises combined with challenges of small local companies. The IT organization supports 6,300 end user names, but many of those are actually shared computers on factory floors. Its main enterprise applications are SAP, Exchange, and Outlook, and its X86 servers are now 75%-80% virtualized.

However, he says, “I still feel we have opportunity to move toward a common, more virtualized environment to better serve our geographically scattered operations. OF course the cloud is also there, but it is not as easy for us to manage.”

“Our virtual servers outnumber the physical servers,” Houston said in an interview on CloudAngle TV from VMworld 2010. “Since 2007 every new system has been virtualized using VMware.” Virtual clusters ensure operational survival at local manufacturing sites. Core data centers in each region are virtualized to provide high responsiveness and fail-over in case of a hardware failure.

This virtualization has been vital to maintaining highly responsive operations in a physically fragmented, worldwide environment while controlling costs in a global recession. It was particularly important in the last two years, during which West Pharma deployed SAP worldwide and upgraded to Exchange 2010, in the process replacing Lotus Notes as well as Exchange 2003.

“We virtualized our development, QA, and test environment with VMware,” Houston said. “That allowed us to deploy and react to project requirements much more quickly.”

The VMware environment also allowed them to react quickly to errors in the deployment. “A regional guy might jump the gun and switch over to the new Exchange version, and it would conflict with a driver somewhere. With the virtualized environment it wasn’t hard to reconfigure a server in a couple of hours instead of doing days of work on site.”

One tip Houston has for others based on his experience: “Don’t tell the vendors you are virtualizing. Whenever I tell a vendor that we are running a virtualized environment they say, ‘Our application won’t run on that.’ I heard horror stories bout running Exchange and other applications on VMware. In every case we found little to be concerned about.”

Overall, he says, “Our executives want us to deliver IT inexpensively and very responsively. VMware has been vital to accomplishing that.”