Land O' Lakes

Agricultural Cooperative Grows More Adaptable with New Virtualization Solution

Land O’Lakes is a large, diversified food and agricultural cooperative based in Arden Hills, Minnesota. Its over-crowded data center contained a proliferation of aging servers, each of which was running only one application. With few extra servers available, developers had to pay for hardware and wait for the IT staff to provision servers for testing and development. Land O’Lakes IT staff deployed a Microsoft® virtualization solution to improve hardware utilization, streamline server provisioning, and increase agility in responding to business directives. Satisfied with the performance of the virtualization solution, Land O’Lakes is testing Windows Server® 2008 Hyper-V™ technology and plans to move its virtualization solution into production. Land O’Lakes expects its virtualized environment to reduce total cost of ownership as part of a strategic, companywide Best Cost Initiative.

 

Situation

Based in Arden Hills, Minnesota, Land O'Lakes is one of the largest food and agricultural co-ops in the United States. Its member-ownership includes approximately 5,000 direct producer-members and 1,100 community cooperatives. 

Land O’Lakes agricultural inputs business includes wholesale crop protection products, seed, and animal feed, as well as state-of-the-art production and business services. The co-op's animal-feed division, Land O'Lakes Purina Feed LLC, is a leading animal- and pet-food manufacturer. In crop inputs, operating under the WinField Solutions™ marketing identity, the company is also among industry leaders in wholesale crop protection products and farm seed.

On the foods side of the business, LAND O LAKES® butter is the top butter brand in the U.S., and the cooperative also holds market-leading positions in deli cheese and branded, dairy-based food-service products. Overall, the LAND O LAKES brand is found on more than 300 dairy-based products.

The company, through its MoArk, LLC subsidiary, is also a leading U.S. marketer of shell eggs. Today, Land O’Lakes conducts business in all 50 states

According to Tony Taylor, Director of IT Services at Land O’Lakes, the company has grown tremendously over the last eight years through mergers and acquisitions. Financial results for 2007 show U.S.$8.9 billion in net sales, up 26 percent from 2006 and $164 million in net earnings, an 84-percent increase over 2006. As a result of recent growth, Land O’Lakes inherited numerous servers and applications to add to its already crowded data center at Arden Hills.

Inefficient Server Utilization

“There are a couple of reasons why we have more applications than most organizations our size,” says Taylor. “As an agrarian company with separate feed, crop input, and dairy divisions, we require a large number of specialized applications that were developed to run in isolation, so most of our servers run only one application. Secondly, the business itself contributed to server sprawl. Land O’Lakes used to be more like a holding company. Each division had a lot of autonomy and they bought their own hardware and software, adding to the total number of servers and applications that we have to maintain. Managing the life cycle of all those boxes was a drain on our IT resources.”
 

Microsoft’s virtualization strategy with the promise of Hyper-V is compelling. We started with Virtual Server 2005 in our test environment and will move into production with the release of Windows Server 2008. Tony Taylor, Director, IT Services, Land O’Lakes

Prior to deploying its virtualization solution, there were more than 385 Intel-based servers in the company’s overcrowded data center, running at an average utilization rate of 3 percent. Another 75 servers resided in the more than 350 remote Land O’Lakes facilities around the United States. Most servers were running the Windows® 2000 Server operating system, however, the company is upgrading them to the Windows Server® 2003 operating system. The servers were connected through a wide area network (WAN) with a single domain Active Directory® service.

“Many of our servers were reaching the end of their life cycle,” says Jason Nord, Server Administrator at Land O’Lakes. “We had 146 servers that were more than five years old, and we had applications that ran on Windows NT® Server 4.0. We faced a combination of low capacity, aging hardware, applications [running] on outdated operating systems, and rising data center power and cooling costs.”

Inefficient Provisioning

The IT department receives requests several times a month from the application development team for test and development servers, and providing these resources was a constant challenge. More often than not, there were no servers available, so the developers had to make a formal application for funds to purchase a new machine. After the IT department ordered the hardware, it could be days before it arrived, and then it took a day or two to provision the server before it was ready to deliver to the development team.

“We were spending too much money on hardware for the test, development, and production environment, and we were slow to respond to the needs of the business,” says Taylor. “It was hugely resource intensive for my engineers to find and prepare the physical assets for our application developers. I wanted to be more responsive to their needs and keep our costs down.”

From a business standpoint, Land O’Lakes had grown from a holding company to one more focused on shared services and using technology investments across all divisions. “The business had evolved to a more centralized management, and we needed the same thing to happen in our [IT] environment,” says Taylor. “A virtualization solution would help us consolidate and upgrade our servers and applications, simplify our environment, and respond more quickly to business needs across our company.” 

In 2006, Land O’Lakes began evaluating different virtualization technologies. Key success factors for a successful virtualization implementation included aligning with application development teams on identifying virtualization candidates, partnering with a strategic implementation partner, and acquiring a highly available hardware platform.

Solution

After comparing virtualization technologies, Land O’Lakes chose a Microsoft® virtualization solution. “We were one of the early adopters of Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 because Microsoft had a compelling end-to-end solution with an integrated management aspect to its virtualization strategy that only promised to get better with the release of Hyper-V™,” says Nord. “We liked how the Microsoft virtualization product roadmap was evolving, so we decided to get on board early.”

“Microsoft’s virtualization strategy with the promise of Hyper-V is compelling,” adds Taylor. “We started with Virtual Server 2005 in our test environment and will move into production with the release of Windows Server® 2008. Virtualization is becoming a commodity and we wanted to get in early and grow with the company. We are a large Microsoft shop and at the end of the day, Microsoft offered the best value for our investment.”

Rolling Out Virtual Server 2005 R2

Land O’Lakes completed an IBM Consolidation Discovery and Analysis Tool (CDAT) engagement in 2006 to determine which servers would be the best candidates for virtualization. Then the IT team rolled out a Virtual Server 2005 R2 virtualization solution in its test and development environment. Four host servers are running in a passive/active cluster. Each physical server hosts between 10 and 13 virtual servers, and each of these virtual servers is running one application.

“We have 39 virtual development servers in that cluster,” explains Nord. “They are mainly application servers, but there are a few database servers for testing a POC [proof of concept] or for patching.”

Testing Hyper-V

During the last year, Land O’Lakes has been preparing to move its virtualization solution into the production environment. To that end, it recently acquired two Hewlett Packard c-Class blade servers. The IT team also signed up for the Microsoft Rapid Deployment Program to test Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V technology. With the Windows Server 2008 operating system, Land O’Lakes acquired everything it needed to support server virtualization. The new Hyper-V technology is a thin layer of software that is integrated into the operating system to provide a more dynamic, reliable, and scalable virtualization environment.

… [W]e improved server provisioning by 50 percent…. Instead of purchasing hardware, our application developers check out virtual resources and return them when they are done. It’s quick, easy, and a lot less expensive. Jason Nord, Server Administrator, Land O’Lakes

“We are excited about the promise of Hyper-V in solving our priority business issues: server consolidation and a more responsive testing and development environment,” says Nord. “The new 64-bit guest support means the architecture is more secure and scalable. Hyper-V offers better support for running simultaneous operating systems, which bodes well for helping us consolidate our applications that run on a variety of older software. We are looking forward to using the new virtual switch capabilities, dynamic resource management, and quick migration of virtual machines to improve our overall responsiveness in the test and development environment.”

“Hyper-V is a thinner, more optimized virtualization technology, and we hope to improve server utilization and better manage our data center, especially in a clustered environment,” adds Taylor.

Currently, the IT team is rolling out Hyper-V in a lab environment that comprises 40 virtual servers on 40 physical boxes. The IT department wants to learn as much as it can about the new virtualization technologies before moving into the production environment. Then, the plan is to migrate the existing Virtual Server 2005 R2 test and development environment (which contains the 4 physical servers and 39 virtual servers) to Hyper-V, consolidating an additional 40 servers on this platform, which were previously identified by CDAT. “Over the year, we’ll be moving another 10 to 15 new applications directly onto virtual servers in the production environment, saving us the cost of hardware for 10 to 15 servers.”

The IT team also deployed Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager to facilitate the management of its virtual machines. Because it is part of the Microsoft System Center family of management products, IT staffers can use System Center Virtual Machine Manager to simplify management of both virtual and physical environments across multiple Virtual Server 2005 R2 and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V host systems.

“System Center Virtual Machine Manager worked really well with Virtual Server 2005, and we are looking forward to even better capabilities with Hyper-V. This is another example where the Microsoft virtualization roadmap is well thought out,” says Nord. We are also planning on upgrading Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 to Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 to take advantage of even more integrated management capabilities.”

Benefits

Land O’Lakes has already experienced significant benefits from its Microsoft virtualization solution. The IT department has made progress in its efforts to consolidate servers in the data center, respond more quickly to the demands of its application developers, and improve centralized management. The end result is that the IT department is empowered to support the evolving needs of the business—a development that has been noted across the company. 

“There are many business benefits to our virtualized solution, depending on who you talk to,” says Taylor. “Our CFO would say it’s great you aren’t spending so much money on hardware, and our business application developers would say it’s great that you can create server environments at a minute’s notice. Our CIO would say that it’s great that you don’t have to expand the data center and you can reduce the heating and cooling costs.”

Improved Server Utilization Cuts Costs

Today, in the test and development environment, Land O’Lakes is running 10 to 13 virtual servers per host server, allowing the IT department to virtualize more than 50 percent of its development servers. One of the main benefits of server consolidation is a lower total cost of ownership, not just from lower hardware requirements, but also from lower power, cooling, and management costs.

“Our Microsoft virtualization solution is a key part of a business strategy we have at Land O’Lakes called Best Cost Initiative,” says Taylor. “It’s not just about cutting costs but looking at where our money is being spent and finding ways to leverage our investments across the company. Virtualization holds a lot of promise in helping us to maximize the value of our IT investments.”

By fall of 2008, Land O’Lakes will be moving its virtualization solution from testing and development and into the production environment.

Nord and his team can use the Virtual Machine Snapshot feature in Hyper-V to take a snapshot of a running virtual machine. “Once we move our older applications running on outdated operating systems onto more stable hardware, we then have the flexibility to test an upgrade path in the virtualized environment,” says Nord. “If necessary, we can easily revert back to a previous state. It will be nice to get those applications on to some stable hardware, at the same time knowing that we have the ability to restore the environment quickly by just restoring the virtual server, instead of the entire server.  This will be an important improvement in our overall ability to perform backups and recovery.”

Streamlined Server Provisioning

Today, the Land O’Lakes IT department is better positioned to answer the demands of application developers for test and development environments across the company.

“With Microsoft virtualization technologies, we improved server provisioning by 50 percent,” says Nord. “Now our test and development environment can support and adapt to the evolving needs of our business. Instead of purchasing hardware, our application developers check out our virtual resources and return them when they are done. It’s quick, easy, and a lot less expensive.”

Improved Integrated Management

Nord is using System Center Virtual Machine Manager to handle both physical and virtual resources. This reduces the management overhead resulting from creating virtual machines, and supports simple and fast server consolidation. “System Center Virtual Machine Manager tells me which host server has the ability to handle more virtual servers,” says Nord. “I also use it to manage all my virtual sessions and for fast physical to virtual migrations. We find it invaluable because we can see the whole virtual environment at one glance.”

Land O’Lake’s new Microsoft virtualization environment forms the basis of a new way of thinking at the company’s data center as the IT department moves forward with its production implementation to align with hardware life-cycle replacement needs and new business projects. “Our Microsoft virtualization solution has certainly reduced the TCO of our data center. We are already achieving greater server utilization, at the same time becoming more responsive to the needs of the business,” concludes Taylor. “Soon we can focus on reducing the number of servers in the field. This is only the beginning of a comprehensive, enterprisewide virtualization strategy. Given how far Microsoft has come over the past few years with their virtualization technologies, we are looking forward to a beneficial partnership going forward.”

Microsoft Virtualization
Microsoft virtualization is an end-to-end strategy that can profoundly affect nearly every aspect of the IT infrastructure management lifecycle. It can drive greater efficiencies, flexibility, and cost effectiveness throughout your organization. From accelerating application deployments; to ensuring systems, applications, and data are always available; to taking the hassle out of rebuilding and shutting down servers and desktops for testing and development; to reducing risk, slashing costs, and improving the agility of your entire environment—virtualization has the power to transform your infrastructure, from the data center to the desktop.

For more information about Microsoft virtualization solutions, go to:
www.microsoft.com/virtualization   

For more information about Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, go to:
www.microsoft.com/scvmm

 

For More Information

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www.microsoft.com

For more information about Land O’Lakes products and services, call (800) 328-9680 or visit the Web site at:
www.landolakesinc.com