Gartmore

Financial Firm Reduces Server Costs, Increases Reliability with Virtualization

Gartmore is an asset manager headquartered in London. The company wanted to reduce server costs in its London data center and find a way to cost effectively and securely place and manage servers in its branch offices. To address these needs, Gartmore deployed the Windows Server® 2008 operating system with Hyper-V™ technology and Microsoft® System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. Gartmore expects to see an 85 percent reduction in server hardware requirements in one data center and an actual server deployment time reduction from two days to one hour. Using the cluster failover capability of Windows Server 2008, Gartmore can provide low-cost high availability for key production workloads. To securely place servers in branch offices and increase application performance, Gartmore also uses the read-only domain controller technology in Windows Server 2008.

 

Situation

As a respected independent fund manager, Gartmore offers a range of investment products and asset management services tailored to meet the needs of both retail and institutional clients. Over the last 30 years, Gartmore has evolved from a leading provider of balanced and indexed funds to a specialist in high-performing and alternative investments.

Financial services firms rely on powerful servers to run complex financial models and also to implement new software that can help them achieve business efficiencies in the areas of collaboration, user productivity, and customer relations. To meet these needs and keep up with overall business growth, Gartmore deployed increasing numbers of servers that soon filled its data center.

The IT staff faced increasing difficulty in powering its constantly-growing collection of servers. Gartmore felt the electrical constraints impacting its business-continuity site outside London, where there was simply no more electrical capacity available. “We have put all new server purchases in this location on hold, because we can’t plug them in,” explains Clive Williams, Head of Enterprise Technical Services for Gartmore. “Between preparation for the 2012 Olympics and general business growth in the United Kingdom, real-estate and electrical costs in London are quite expensive and capacity is constrained.”

The shortage of server space was another obstacle to business growth. For example, Gartmore needed 30 development-and-test servers for a planned rollout of Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 but did not have room in its data center. 

It was difficult to justify bringing in new servers, because most of the existing servers were underutilized and much of the processing power untapped. However, application software support requirements and security concerns dictated that Gartmore run many business applications on dedicated servers.

We were always concerned about creating a single point of failure, but with Windows Server 2008 clustering and Hyper-V, we can take the consolidation ratio much higher. Clive Williams Head of Enterprise Technical Services, Gartmore

In addition to wanting to curb server growth and increase server utilization, Gartmore wanted to reduce the growing expense of deploying and configuring servers. It took the IT staff two days to deploy one physical server and build the operating system. In its test-and-development area alone, the IT staff built or rebuilt about 80 servers a year, which consumed about 160 days annually. Testing and deploying software upgrades on fund traders’ desktop computers took about five days a month. Together, these tasks constituted a full year of an IT staff person’s time.

While Gartmore wanted to scale back the number of servers in its London data center, it wanted to install servers in its four branch offices. Employees in these offices used Terminal Services in the Windows Server® 2003 operating system to access corporate applications remotely. However, as these offices grew, so did their need for local file-and-print servers and improved performance for network logon and critical business applications. Previously, deploying servers locally in these offices posed questions around supportability and security that required a disproportionate investment to resolve.

Solution

Gartmore knew that server virtualization could solve its server proliferation problems and had already used Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 to consolidate some servers. However, to go further with virtualization, Gartmore needed support for 64-bit Windows Server, which is required by Office SharePoint Server 2007 and other applications. “We investigated the virtualization products out there, and Hyper-V was the best fit for our requirements,” Williams says. “Also, we’d already invested in several Microsoft System Center solutions, which gave us a very comprehensive management suite. We wanted to stick with Microsoft in our data center wherever possible.”

In early 2008, Gartmore learned about the Windows Server 2008 operating system featuring Hyper-V™ technology, which provides built-in server virtualization and high-availability capabilities. To better evaluate the virtualization software, Gartmore joined the Microsoft Virtualization Rapid Deployment Program (RDP).

Gartmore also deployed Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, a virtual machine management solution that includes integrated management capability and templates and wizards to simplify both physical-to-virtual (P2V) and virtual-to-virtual (V2V) migration. It’s written around the Windows PowerShell™ command-line interface shell and scripting language with more than 170 standard command-line tools and includes a Self-Service portal through which end users can create and operate their own virtual machines within a controlled environment.

“The P2V capabilities of Virtual Machine Manager 2008, together with the PowerShell scripting capabilities, enable us to script P2V creation from users’ desktops and enable security testing on real-life configurations with no impact to critical users,” says Tony Ratcliffe, Technical Consultant in Enterprise Technical Services at Gartmore.

During the RDP, Gartmore worked with Microsoft Services, which developed a script using Windows PowerShell for the P2V migration. Using the Windows® Volume Shadow Copy Service, Microsoft Services also wrote a script to continuously back up virtual machines, which Gartmore intends to use until Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 can support Hyper-V virtual-machine backup.

“Microsoft Services helped us with scripting and helped us understand how to use Hyper-V with the Windows Server 2008 cluster environment,” Williams says. “We originally did not have the confidence to introduce clustering at an early stage, but we were so impressed with Windows Server 2008 clustering that we decided to implement it far sooner with the help of Microsoft Services.”

Gartmore has deployed Windows Server 2008 Datacenter with Hyper-V technology in several different scenarios:

• Development and test. Gartmore used the Self-Service portal in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to build an online template for developers to create and maintain their own virtual machines for test purposes.
• Business continuity. Gartmore has also deployed Hyper-V in its business-continuity site outside London, where it plans to use Windows Server 2008 clustering capabilities to provide cost-effective high availability.
• Software testing on trader desktops. Gartmore is running the Windows XP operating system on Hyper-V virtual machines to test software upgrades to traders’ desktop computers. This gives developers the ability to ensure that an upgrade will work correctly before deploying it.
• Branch office RODC. Gartmore has also deployed a Hyper-V host with a copy of Windows Server 2008 read-only domain controller (RODC) in a virtual machine. An RODC is a specialized Windows Server 2008 Server Core installation that hosts read-only partitions of Active Directory® Domain Services. An RODC provides a way to deploy a domain controller more securely in locations that require fast and reliable authentication services but cannot ensure the physical security for a writeable domain controller.

Gartmore will use Hyper-V and System Center capabilities to install one or two physical servers in each branch office and create several virtual machines that will run file, print, Active Directory authentication, and other applications locally.

The company currently has seven physical servers running Hyper-V, with about 25 to 30 virtual machines across these physical servers. Gartmore uses a variety of Dell PowerEdge servers that feature multiple dual-core or quad-core Intel Xeon processors. The company runs the 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows Server 2008 Datacenter, as well as Windows Server 2003 Standard and Windows Server 2003 Enterprise, as guest operating systems on Hyper-V.

Gartmore looks forward to using System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 to back up all development-and-test virtual machines straight to disk and automatically archive files to tape. It also wants to replicate production data to its business-continuity site.

To gain comprehensive real-time management of virtual servers and obtain reports for planning virtual machine resource allocation, Gartmore plans to use Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007. And it will soon upgrade from Microsoft Systems Management Server to Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 to extend the server configuration capabilities to a virtual environment and better integrate with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

Benefits

Gartmore has successfully deployed Windows Server 2008 Datacenter and Hyper-V in its data center, which has resulted in reduced server hardware and management costs and improved application availability. In time, Gartmore will deploy the operating system and virtualization software in its branch offices to improve application performance and user productivity.

Reduced Server and Electrical Costs

In its business continuity location, Gartmore expects to reduce server hardware by 85 percent, which represents a reduction of approximately 20 physical servers. “We haven’t calculated server reduction costs for the rest of the company, as the business continuity site is our testing ground; however, we hope to see similar hardware and electrical cost reductions in our data center,” Williams says. Also, with Hyper-V being part of Windows Server 2008, it dramatically lowers software licensing costs.

The clustering capabilities in Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V will enable Gartmore to consolidate servers at much higher ratios than it previously considered. “We were always concerned about creating a single point of failure, but with Windows Server 2008 clustering and Hyper-V, we can take the consolidation ratio much higher,” Williams says. “We plan to consolidate and virtualize many of our Web infrastructure, database servers, and other production workloads, and anticipate much greater server utilization once this is complete.”

More Efficient IT Management

Gartmore has used Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V to dramatically reduce server deployment time. “It used to take us about two days to get a physical server racked and the operating system built, but with Hyper-V it takes us one hour,” Ratcliffe says. Routine server administrative tasks take less time, too. The time needed to reboot a virtual server is significantly faster than the time needed to reboot a physical server—15 to 30 seconds instead of five minutes.

The P2V capabilities of Virtual Machine Manager 2008, together with the PowerShell scripting capabilities, enables us to script P2V creation from users’ desktops and enable security testing on real-life configurations with no impact to critical users. Tony Ratcliffe Technical Consultant, Enterprise Technical Services, Gartmore

Because of the ease with which the IT staff can bring up a new virtual machine with Hyper-V, the staff has changed the way it responds to server failures. “If a failed server was one targeted for virtualization anyway, we just virtualize it rather than redeploy a new physical server,” Ratcliffe says. “A physical-to-physical migration takes about five hours and incurs scheduled downtime and costly weekend or off-hours overtime for our staff. Now we’re able to eliminate all that. We simply perform a physical-to-virtual server migration in a few minutes and decommission the failed server.”

The simplicity and ease with which Gartmore can move virtual-machine workloads between hosts is another timesaver. “Using the Administrator Console in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, we can get a clear picture of our entire environment and how performance looks across servers,” Williams says. “We can change resource settings on virtual machines without interrupting workloads and migrate virtual machines from one host to another to optimize performance.”

Desktop troubleshooting is also faster thanks to Hyper-V virtualization technology. When a user had a problem with their desktop computer, the IT staff scheduled time on the computer to troubleshoot the problem, which interrupted productivity. Using the physical-to-virtual capability in Hyper-V, the IT staff can quickly make a copy of the user’s computer and perform its troubleshooting on the virtual copy without interrupting the user.

Increased Availability

Gartmore anticipates that the use of cluster technology in Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V will increase application availability. It intends to use Hyper-V to automatically and periodically copy snapshots of key production workloads to its business continuity site. “The cluster failover capability is fantastic,” Williams says. “The scant time it takes to move guest workloads from one host to another means that we can update a Hyper-V host system or perform hardware maintenance work with no interruptions to the business. Before, we limited virtualization to development servers and would not run production applications on virtual machines. But now, we’re confident that Hyper-V is ready to run selected production environments.”

Cost-Effective Branch-Office Servers

Using the RODC feature in Windows Server 2008, Gartmore will be able to cost effectively deploy servers in remote locations. “Deploying physical and virtual machines in our branch offices along with the RODC feature in Windows Server 2008 will enable us to provide remote users with increased processing performance at lower costs,” Williams says. “It will help us meet our business growth demands while keeping IT costs low.”

 

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

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For more information about Gartmore products and services, visit the Web site at:
www.gartmore.com