University of Canberra

Virtualization Halves Management Effort for Campus Technology Support

Situation

Located in the Australian Capital Territory, the University of Canberra employs approximately 1,200 staff and teaches over 9,000 students, including 1,600 from overseas.

We are big believers in technology. To provide cutting-edge teaching, we need innovative technology. Tom Townsend, Windows Systems Team Leader, ICT Services, University of Canberra

The university maintains nearly 2,000 desktops to assist students and staff with research, communication, and learning. Much of the university’s teaching is conducted in a lab format, which is designed to give students access to teaching material during instruction. Internet access is a university service, and students each receive a monthly download allowance.

The quality of its IT infrastructure is one of the university’s competitive differentiators.

“We are big believers in technology,” says Tom Townsend, Windows Systems Team Leader, Information and Communication Technology Services, University of Canberra. “To provide cutting-edge teaching, we need innovative technology.”

However, Townsend and his team were constrained by having to maintain a very large, diffuse and vulnerable server environment.

“The network was highly vulnerable to students bringing laptops on site. Someone could pull the network cable from the desktop and put it into the back of their machine. If there were a virus or worm on the machine, it would get straight onto our network.”

Stringent security requirements made server maintenance and new server roll-out a very time-consuming process.

“We needed to be able to deploy new servers faster,” explains Townsend. “It would take us a long time just to get a new server into production because of the amount of configuration we had to do to make it secure. It was very difficult to get firewall protection up and running because of the huge range of ports that needed changing.”

Townsend’s Team was attempting to alleviate their workload by simplifying the server environment. Each of the university faculties had developed its own IT system, and many hosted old legacy applications. Townsend wanted to centralize these systems and had started to experiment with virtualization as a way of doing this.

“We started to experiment with virtualization on Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 as a way of consolidating our IT and making it easier to manage. We began with a handful of very old systems where we could not get warranty extensions,” explains Townsend.

As he became more comfortable with virtualization, Townsend made plans to transition other servers, such as license servers and one of the university’s document management systems, TRIM, believing this would deliver significant hardware and efficiency savings.

By the end of 2007 the university was ready to commence a significant technology upgrade. But without a more manageable server platform, Townsend knew that his staff would not be able to cope with rolling out new services or make any further progress with virtualization.

“We needed to free up our time so we could give our staff and student customers better service,” says Townsend. “To do that, we just needed a more manageable server environment. We spent all our time fighting fires and fixing problems.”

Solution

Knowing the university to be a keen technology advocate, Microsoft approached the IT services department in December 2007 to gauge its interest in the Rapid Deployment Program for Windows Server 2008. The university asked Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Dimension Data to advise and implement a solution.

“The University of Canberra was very focused,” says David Hanrahan, General Manager, Microsoft Solutions, Australia, Dimension Data. “They needed more confidence that their network services were secure and they needed it to be upgradeable without requiring any increase in staff.”

The entire process – from testing and development to roll-out – took three weeks. This was very fast. We would normally have had to test in a physical environment and this would have taken twice as long. Tom Townsend, Windows Systems Team

Dimension Data recommended Windows Server 2008 because the changes to Active Directory Domain Services would make comprehensive network security easier to maintain. Additionally, improved server configuration and deployment features promised to make the university’s server environment more adaptable. Hanrahan pointed out that in Windows Server 2008, administrators need only activate the roles that the particular server is required to fulfill, and each role is automatically configured. This would make servers much faster to roll out.

Finally, the Hyper-V™ functionality in Windows Server 2008 would enable Townsend to virtualize far more of the server environment and further centralize the university’s faculty-based IT systems.

The university agreed, and by early February 2008 they were ready to transfer domains to Windows Server 2008.

“We had to be careful about migration,” explains Hanrahan. “Because of the very large number of users, the key thing was ensuring continuity of username authentication and access rights as we transitioned the domains.”

Dimension Data helped Townsend set up a duplicate of the entire domain on Hyper-V–activated test and development servers, which they used to test the upgrade path.

Says Townsend, “The entire process – from testing and development to roll-out – took three weeks. This was very fast. We would normally have had to test in a physical environment and this would have taken twice as long.

“Actually, one of the nice parts of Windows Server 2008 is the server migration process,” says Hanrahan. “We didn’t have to move the main files around. There were no compatibility issues and it was a very simple process.”

Benefits

Technology staff at the University of Canberra gained immediate benefits from the Windows Server 2008 environment. Deploying new servers was faster and easier and systems became more secure. In addition, the university started to make efficiency savings from increasing the number of virtualized servers.

Simplified server configuration and management

IT staff commission new servers faster and more easily because of the role-centric design of Windows Server 2008.

“You can really feel the maturity of the setup wizard,” comments Townsend. “Once the server is built, you log on and select the roles you want the server to fulfill. The commands that activate each role are scripted and it is very intuitive.

“This makes a huge difference to the time it takes us to commission new servers and bring new applications online. In fact, we often found that we didn’t need to leave the server manager console, as most server administration tasks can be carried out from there.”

In fact, maintaining the server environment now takes very little time out of my day. Virtualization has halved the amount of time spent managing the environment. Tom Townsend, Windows Systems Team Leader, ICT Services, University of Canberra

Better security, faster roll-out

IT staff can have confidence that the university’s network is more secure than before. The roles-based approach of Windows Server 2008 makes it easier to protect servers from security threats.

“When we are setting up a Domain Controller, for example, the server creates all the firewall exceptions you need, and leaves all the others out,” says Townsend.

“This happens by default,” explains Hanrahan. “Because we turn off the server services that are not going to be used, there is a smaller attack surface area. And because you set up the server by activating the roles you want, there is less chance of something being left on by accident, which often presents a hidden gateway.”

“Not having to configure the firewall probably saves us a day’s work per server,” adds Townsend. “We spent about three months configuring the firewalls on our Microsoft Windows 2003 Domain Controllers. With Windows Server 2008, I don’t even have to think about it. The mentality of the system is that everything should be off by default, which makes us much more secure.”

Easier user administration

As a large organization with a complex structure, the university has been able to improve the way it administers network access.

“Previously we had different group policies for different areas of the university, but this was unwieldy and didn’t give us the flexibility that the university wanted,” explains Townsend.

“Windows Server 2008 has preferences as well as policies. When I create a policy for a particular area I can also set conditions on that policy. This means that I can enforce access discrimination within a particular group. A user has to meet certain criteria. Ultimately, this means I don’t have to invest time in creating a group policy for a single individual.”

Virtual future

Using Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 has enabled the IT department to press ahead with virtualizing the university’s server environment.

“Now we can virtualize more intensive roles that used to be too big to virtualize because they required too much RAM. I can do everything much quicker,” says Townsend.

Since transitioning the domains, Townsend has put the university’s corporate search engine on Hyper-V. In addition, he has virtualized temporary domain services and, commenced migration to a graphically animated home page, all running on Hyper-V.

Better performance

Virtualization has directly benefited both users and administrators at the university.

“Processing times are much quicker,” says Townsend. “I estimate the performance jump is about 40%.”

Townsend has also achieved the objective of making the server environment easier to manage.

“At a glance, the Virtual Machine Manager gives me a good sense of the entire environment. During a patch cycle, for example, I don’t need to log on to each server. I can see it all from the main console.

“I can also see where I have capacity to place redundancy. Virtual Machine Manager gives all servers a star rating according to their available resources. It will tell me which is the most appropriate place to put a new server without me doing a mini-audit, which I used to have to do about once per month.

“In fact, maintaining the server environment now takes very little time out of my day. Virtualization has halved the amount of time spent managing the environment.”

Real efficiency savings

By enabling the university to reduce its server requirement, Hyper-V has helped Townsend centralize the university server environment and generate efficiency savings.

“I’ve just done the analysis for future procurement,” says Townsend. “We have nearly A$1 million dollars worth of hardware currently not virtualized, but appropriate for virtualization. It would cost about $400,000 to buy the replacement hardware if we used Hyper-V. So with virtualization, we are in a position to replace legacy hardware at 40% of the nominal cost.”

The IT department has also gained supplementary benefits they had not expected. Townsend noticed that his department is using less power, especially on cooling, which he describes as a very significant cost.

However, for Townsend the ultimate benefit is that he knows he will have to buy less hardware in the future.

“Right now, I am ordering two new Hyper-V servers to replace 13 production servers. And I will still have slack.”

Windows Server 2008

Windows Server 2008, with built-in Web and virtualization technologies, enables you to increase the reliability and flexibility of your server infrastructure. New virtualization tools, Web resources, and security enhancements help you save time, reduce costs, and provide a platform for a dynamic and optimized datacenter. Powerful new tools like IIS 7.0, Server Manager, and Windows® PowerShell, allow you to have more control over your servers and streamline Web, configuration, and management tasks. Advanced security and reliability enhancements like Network Access Protection and the Read-Only Domain Controller option for Active Directory Domain Services harden the operating system and help protect your server environment to ensure you have a solid foundation on which to build your business.

For more information, go to: www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com

For more information about Dimension Data products and services, call (+61) 3 9626 0770 or visit the Web site at: www.dimensiondata.com/au

For more information about University of Canberra products and services, call (+61) 2 6201 5111 or visit the Web site at: www.canberra.edu.au