Volusia County Schools

School District Uses Virtualization to Improve IT and Cut Costs During Budget Crisis

Volusia County Schools serves residents on the east coast of Central Florida. To reduce costs, the school district’s IT department wanted to cut its server acquisition rate and consolidate existing servers—while continuing efforts to improve the quality of education. The department used the Windows Server® 2008 Enterprise operating system with Hyper-V™ virtualization technology to consolidate 70 servers to 6, a 90 percent reduction. It also uses Microsoft® System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 for easier server management. With Hyper-V, the district centralized its servers and expects to reduce server acquisition by about 80 percent annually. Most importantly, the IT department improved business continuity and its ability to deliver new applications to students and staff in less time, at a fraction of the cost it took to deploy them on dedicated physical servers.

 

We needed to be more responsive to the needs of the district, which meant being able to deliver applications and services much faster. Ken Richmond Manager of System Engineering, Volusia County Schools

Situation

Volusia County Schools serves an area on the east coast of Central Florida that includes 47 miles of beachfront property. Volusia County is home to more than 500,000 residents, including those of its most notable city, Daytona Beach. The school district, which comprises 75 schools and approximately 65,000 students, is nationally recognized for its early adoption of and commitment to the use of technology in the classroom to boost student achievement.

Florida schools have experienced revenue loss and consequent reductions in staff, and Volusia County Schools, like other school districts, continues to look for cost-saving measures.

For the Volusia County Schools IT department, located at district headquarters in DeLand, Florida, staffing reductions presented a significant problem. “Whether we have 1,000 more or 1,000 fewer students, we still have to maintain the same network and the same IT infrastructure,” says Ken Richmond, Manager of System Engineering for Volusia County Schools. “And now, we have to do it with an even smaller staff and budget.”

The district’s IT environment includes a central data center in DeLand that houses approximately 150 servers, including an IBM iSeries Midrange Server for critical student and business applications. The district leases a 10-gigabyte (GB) ring between cluster sites with 1-GB service from schools located in that geographic area. Users access the Internet through the district’s 100-megabyte (MB), high-speed connection with the Florida Information Resource Network through a connection at the data center. In addition to supporting this infrastructure, the IT department develops, deploys, and maintains hundreds of IT, human resource, finance, facilities management, and education applications.

For the school district, maintaining this multitude of applications is a necessity driven by business needs, curriculum, and student performance goals. But for the IT department, it could be a nightmare. Quite often, each of these applications required its own server. “We were having a hard time supporting the district,” says Richmond. “The process to acquire a new server was lengthy. We had to gather quotes, generate purchase orders, install software, and configure the server with limited personnel and resources. We needed to be more responsive to the needs of the district, which meant being able to deliver applications and services much faster.”

To deploy new applications, the district purchased about 25 servers a year. Not only was the deployment process long and cumbersome, but the model of a single application or operating system per server was physically and financially unsustainable. “All of our data center racks were full,” says Richmond. “Our cooling system was reaching maximum capacity, and so was our battery backup system—and we had just upgraded it only three years ago.” To accommodate a larger server footprint, the district estimated that it would have to spend U.S.$250,000 to physically expand the data center.

The server administration staff that is responsible for deploying and maintaining servers is also responsible for maintaining the district’s software development environment. The district performs a great deal of in-house development and software customization, using Microsoft® ASP.NET technology. “We have 25 developers that need an environment that can be picked up, torn down, and recreated just about every other week,” says Richmond. “Trying to do this with any regularity was prohibitive.”

We liked the consistency of the Hyper-V interface with the rest of our Microsoft environment. Ken Richmond Manager of System Engineering, Volusia County Schools

Lacking a dedicated test and development environment, the team completed all development projects on the district’s production servers. This resulted in frequent interruption of active services, which negatively impacted business continuity.

The district also needed to improve its processes for backing up and restoring servers in the event of a hardware failure or natural disaster. “In 2004, we experienced four hurricanes in six weeks, and each time we had to take down our data center,” says David Lind, System Engineer for Volusia County Schools. The proliferation of servers—both at the data center and among the schools and administrative locations—also complicated backup processes.

From a management perspective, Creed R. Wheeler, the district’s Assistant Director for Technical Services, says, “The servers at our schools are difficult to manage and back up because there is no dedicated IT staff at most sites. We rely on administrative staff to put in a tape and perform a backup on a Friday afternoon, which doesn’t always happen. Our ultimate goal was to centralize our servers and consolidate them for easier management. We needed to take charge and protect our data so that we could manage it, control it, and restore it.”

Solution

In 2007 Volusia County Schools started using virtualization to complete the implementation of an enterprise desktop management product. Using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1, the school district successfully completed the deployment with minimal expenditure on additional servers. The IT department also migrated some file and print servers to virtual machines—consolidating 30 physical servers to three servers. “Virtual Server 2005 showed us the benefits of virtualization. Right away we saw huge gains.” says Richmond.
Due to this success with Virtual Server 2005, the district decided to invest in a comprehensive virtualization environment. “In this next phase, we needed a solution that would help us virtualize many more servers and easily manage what could be an enormous virtualized environment,” says Richmond.

During its evaluation of several virtualization products, the district’s Microsoft representative introduced the IT department to the Windows Server® 2008 operating system featuring Hyper-V™ virtualization technology. “We liked the consistency of the Hyper-V interface with the rest of our Microsoft environment,” says Richmond.  The department also decided to use Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to manage its virtual machines.

Upon invitation from Microsoft, the school district opted to participate in the Microsoft Virtualization Rapid Deployment Program (RDP). With help from Microsoft Services, the IT department finalized its virtualization architecture and implemented Windows Server 2008 Enterprise with Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.  “We identified 154 servers that were candidates for virtualization,” says Wheeler. “But thanks to a recent project in which we increased the district’s bandwidth, we were able to turn many of those servers off before the Hyper-V deployment. That left us with about 70 servers to consolidate.”

With the automated backup environment that Hyper-V and System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 provide, we no longer have to rely on a clerk at a school to put in a backup tape on a Friday afternoon. Creed R. Wheeler Associate Director for Technical Services, Volusia County Schools

The IT department used six Dell PowerEdge R900 servers with Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors and 128 GB of RAM. These six servers are configured as an active-passive cluster connected to an EMC Symmetrix DMX-4 950 storage area network (SAN) with fiber channel connectivity. These servers will run Windows Server 2008 Enterprise, while the virtual machines will run a combination of Windows® 2000 Server, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, and Windows Server 2008. Richmond’s team has identified targets for conversion to virtual machines, many of which will be physical-to-virtual conversions, but some will be virtual-to-virtual conversions from the district’s Virtual Server 2005 environment.

The district plans to run the majority of its applications in its new virtual environment. It will also be able to create a dedicated, virtualized environment for test and development so that the IT department can develop applications and services without disrupting staff, students, and faculty.

The IT department has also adopted solutions from Microsoft System Center to manage its physical and virtual environments. “We’re using System Center Virtual Machine Manager to manage the whole environment,” says Richmond. “It’s a one-stop-shop—it lets us manage our cluster and our hosts in the same location.” Hyper-V uses the Volume Shadow Copy Service in Windows Server 2008 to take point-in-time snapshots of servers, and the IT department also uses Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 for simpler data backups of workloads on both physical servers and virtual machines.

In addition to Hyper-V, the IT department takes advantage of other features of Windows Server 2008. A few examples include the Read Only Domain Controller, which will help the district simplify authentication of users across the network; the Terminal Services Gateway feature, which will allow teachers, students, and staff to connect to district resources without having to use a virtual private network; and Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0, the Web and application platform included with Windows Server 2008. “IIS 7.0 is going to significantly streamline deployment of new and updated applications,” says Richmond. The district’s developers rely on the Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET 2003 Professional Edition development system, and the new Application Server role in IIS 7.0 provides a highly integrated environment to build applications with the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0.

Benefits

With its new solution, Volusia County Schools anticipates savings on computer hardware and IT labor costs, simplified server management, and improved business continuity by reducing downtime of critical applications and services. But most importantly, virtualization enables the district’s IT department to deliver much-needed applications and services faster than before.

Reduced IT Costs
Once the district completed its bandwidth upgrade, the IT department was able to decommission many of its servers, leaving approximately 70 servers that were fit for virtualization. The department is consolidating these 70 servers to six physical servers, an 11:1 consolidation ratio.

Based on a Virtualization Readiness Assessment study conducted by Dell in 2007, with funding from Intel, it is believed that this consolidation will enable the district to realize a 90 percent reduction of its target servers, resulting in a savings of approximately $500,000 over a three-year period. This also includes savings from reduced support costs and reduced facilities costs.

Previously, the IT department experienced a vast underuse of existing hardware resources. For example, an analysis of processing power revealed that the average peak utilization of the district’s central processing units was less than 6 percent. This meant that the district was not taking advantage of its investment in computing resources. Running multiple virtual machines on a single server creates a much more efficient environment, allowing the district to fully benefit from its server resources. “We’re going to cap our overall utilization—including processor and memory—at 75 percent,” says Richmond. “That’s a huge improvement.”

The connection between Hyper-V, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, and System Center Configuration Manager … gives us the ability to delegate server management tasks without giving away the keys to the kingdom. Ken Richmond Manager of System Engineering, Volusia County Schools

Before implementing Hyper-V, the district bought roughly 25 new servers each year. “Our goal for this project was to purchase no more than 10 new servers a year,” says Richmond. “After testing Hyper-V, we think we can achieve even higher density. We’re expecting to purchase fewer than five new servers a year.”

Easier Server Management
With its new solution, the school district has a centralized management console for hundreds of Hyper-V virtual machines and physical servers. “Hyper-V, used with System Center Virtual Machine Manager and other System Center products, gives us the same functionality as competitors’ products, but within a cohesive, Microsoft-based environment,” says Richmond.

Wheeler adds, “The entire System Center suite is important. We’re using System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 to speed the backup process for our virtual environment—and we can do it all within a familiar interface.” The district can back up snapshots of running servers to the media of its choosing, saving time and minimizing backup scheduling conflicts. “With the automated backup environment that Hyper-V and System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 provide, we no longer have to rely on a clerk at a school to put in a backup tape on a Friday afternoon,” continues Wheeler.

Faster Application Deployment
With Virtual Server 2005, the district reduced the turnaround time for deploying certain applications from up to 10 days to less than one day. “But the Virtual Server 2005 environment wasn’t comprehensive,” says Richmond. “We were only using it only for certain projects because we didn’t have the capabilities to manage a larger virtualization environment. With Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, we expect to bring this same deployment speed to nearly all new requests for applications from teachers and staff.”

Better Business Continuity
Virtualization, combined with the increased bandwidth of the district’s network, has enabled the IT department to consolidate the majority of the district’s servers to its main data center in DeLand and several smaller adjunct sites. Most of the applications and services used by the schools will run from virtual machines located at these sites. “Virtualization allows us to centralize our data so that we can manage it more easily and restore it when we need to,” says Richmond. “We don’t have to worry about servers in 90-degree closets in schools overheating without being backed up. Without Hyper-V, we wouldn’t have the room to bring all of these applications and services back to the data center.”

Teachers and staff are also able to take advantage of better backup and recovery capabilities for information and data they store on the district’s servers, because these hard disk volumes are safeguarded by the Volume Shadow Copy Service. “With a few simple clicks, they can restore information they accidentally deleted,” says Richmond. “With Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V, we can do multisite clustering and provide failover support and load balancing for physical and virtual machines,” says Richmond. With this configuration, the IT department has a better disaster recovery environment. In the event of a hurricane, for example, if the department needs to shut down one of its data centers, it can manually or automatically move virtual machines to another location. This speeds recovery times and minimizes disruption to teachers, students, and staff.

Finally, with Hyper-V, the district can provide its IT staff with an environment in which they can easily build and take down machines to test new applications, operating systems, and hardware, as well as ensure compatibility between various components of the district’s infrastructure. Developers can create a virtualized instance of an application or environment for testing purposes before deploying to production servers. System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 also makes it easier for the district’s developers to quickly provision virtual machines without relying on busy server administrators.

Richmond says, “The connection between Hyper-V, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, and System Center Configuration Manager allows us to more easily manage images and provide self-service virtual machine deployment capabilities to our staff. It also gives us the ability to delegate server management tasks without giving away the keys to the kingdom.”
 
Better Delivery of Educational Services
For students, teachers, staff, and parents, perhaps the biggest benefit of virtualization is that it enhances the IT department’s ability to provide educational resources—faster, and at a lower cost. “The IT department brings a lot more to the table,” says Richmond. “Before, we were limited in what we could provide. We weren’t able to deliver many of the applications teachers and staff needed, or do it in a timely manner. Many applications were on hold until we could purchase more hardware, more power, more racks, and more cooling. We also didn’t have the labor resources we needed. With Hyper-V, we’re already beginning to deploy these much-needed applications and services.”

Wheeler concludes, “Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager help us support more educational applications and services, faster, at lower costs, and with limited staff.”

 

Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008
Together, Hyper-V technology—a key feature of the Windows Server 2008 operating system and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 provide a reliable virtualization technology and comprehensive management solution that make it easier for customers to virtualize their IT infrastructure and reduce costs. With integrated administration, customers can use a single console to centralize management of a heterogeneous virtual machine infrastructure; increase physical server utilization; rapidly provision new virtual machines; and provide dynamic performance and resource optimization of hardware, operating systems, and applications. Both of these technologies easily plug into existing infrastructures, so companies can continue to use their current patching, provisioning, management, and support tools and processes. This combined virtualization technology and management solution also provides great value, because customers can make the most of their IT professionals' skill set, the breadth of solutions from Microsoft partners, and comprehensive support from Microsoft.

For more information, go to:
www.microsoft.com/hyper-v
www.microsoft.com/scvmm

For more information and links to similar case studies, visit the Microsoft Education solutions website for Virtualization: http://www.microsoft.com/education/solutions/virtualization.aspx

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 Volusia County Schools products and services, call (386) 734-7190 or visit the Web site at:
www.volusia.k12.fl.us