4-page Case Study - Posted 10/31/2008

Views: 498

Rate This Evidence:

Avanade

IT Consultancy Firm Moves Toward Universal Virtualization

Avanade is a rapidly expanding global IT consultancy firm with a growing number of professionals. Until recently, the IT department could not contain the equally impressive increase in servers. When Avanade deployed a virtualization solution with the Windows Server® 2008 operating system and Hyper-V™ technology running on Sun x64 servers, the company gained the performance, reliability, and scalability to virtualize as many workloads as possible, including resource-intensive 64-bit applications. Over the next five years, Avanade expects to avoid U.S.$835,000 in hardware expenses and rack-space charges, and to slow storage growth by 58 percent. Today, the IT staff can provision test environments in hours instead of waiting weeks for new servers, enabling the IT department to more quickly respond to business requirements, including the development of a new disaster-recovery center. 

Situation

Founded in 2000 in Seattle, Washington, Avanade is a global IT consultancy firm dedicated to helping enterprise businesses achieve profitable growth. Through proven solutions that extend Microsoft® products, Avanade helps customers increase revenue, reduce costs, and reinvest in innovation to gain competitive advantage. The company’s consultants, including an extensive offshore community of Microsoft technology experts, deliver value according to each customer’s requirements, timeline, and budget by combining insight and innovation. 

The company’s burgeoning business is reflected in a growing, global roster of professionals. In the last three years, 6,000 employees joined Avanade, bringing the total to approximately 9,000 consultants across 22 countries. Together, they helped generate an annual revenue of U.S.$845 million in fiscal year 2008.

Hyper-V technology helps us run many virtual servers on a single cluster with performance nearly equal to a ‘native’ operating system. The result is a powerhouse of performance, manageability, and scalability. Dale Christian Chief Information Officer, Avanade

Buying and provisioning servers for the test and development environment not only added to server sprawl, but reduced the IT department’s efficiency in responding to the needs of the business. Avanade has a 13-member local infrastructure development team and an application development team in India. These teams rely on servers for five or six projects every quarter. “We had to order hardware, wait for delivery, install it on the rack, and configure the operating system to provision test and development environments,” explains Muhich. “Server deployment of new workloads could take weeks. This slowed down the deployment of new applications and services.”

The Avanade IT department used Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 to address some of these issues, but the company ran into performance problems that curtailed the development environments they were able to provide and limited the kind of applications and operating systems available for virtualization in the production environment.

“As Avanade moves toward a standardized 64-bit environment, Virtual Server 2005 couldn’t provide us with the performance we needed,” says Andy Schneider, Infrastructure Architect at Avanade. “Any time we wanted to virtualize a 64-bit operating system, we either had to buy hardware or pay for a VMware license. Neither option was a good use of our resources.”

Avanade wanted to virtualize Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 but was forced to buy more servers to host the solution instead. “The big bottleneck before we got anywhere near to reaching the limit of CPU cycles or network interface card bandwidth was that we ran out of memory,” says Schneider. “We wanted the best of both worlds: the smallest physical footprint with as many workloads and as much memory as possible, in one rack unit.”

These issues affected both the IT department and the business as a whole. Time wasted on inefficient server provisioning and the extra work required to manage underutilized servers affected IT staff productivity. The situation also made it difficult for Avanade to formulate effective disaster-recovery strategies and to make any real strides toward a corporate virtualization strategy. “We had all the classic virtualization drivers for affecting a virtualization solution,” says Muhich. “We had been buying more servers to solve these problems for so long because there wasn’t a viable, cost-effective virtualization technology we could use to build a strategy for high availability and disaster recovery and to provide the business with more responsive IT services.”

Solution

When Microsoft released the Windows Server® 2008 operating system and Hyper-V™ virtualization technology, Avanade recognized a valuable opportunity. “We had been waiting for something like Hyper-V to come along so that we could at last put into practice our preferred corporate strategy: everything that goes into production will be virtualized, unless you can prove to our team that it shouldn’t,” says Schneider. “Hyper-V was significantly more cost effective than those VMware licenses we had used for our test and development environment. Hyper-V also had more than enough performance, scalability, and reliability for our needs.”

Choosing the Best Hardware Platform

Patrick Cimprich, Chief Architect of Enterprise Technology Solutions for Avanade, designed a series of tests to evaluate the readiness of Hyper-V for production environments. Cimprich used the release-to-manufacturing version of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V on Sun Microsystems x64 servers. The tests addressed different aspects of system performance in several intensive input/output (I/O) workloads. The team configured tests for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 e-mail messaging and collaboration software, as well as tests for Microsoft Dynamics® CRM 4.0 that focused on collecting data from Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 data management software.

Any time we wanted to virtualize a 64-bit operating system, we either had to buy hardware or pay for a VMware license. Neither option was a good use of our resources. Andy Schneider Infrastructure Architect, Avanade

“We performed a simultaneous execution of tests for Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM on a single Hyper-V server, the 8-socket Sun Fire X4600 M2. The server was configured with 16 cores, the maximum number of cores supported by the released version of Hyper-V,” says Cimprich. “We had already achieved impressive results showing the ability of Hyper-V to easily support 4,000 Exchange Server 2007 users. As a Microsoft SQL Server environment, we had also been impressed with how Hyper-V supported 6,000 Microsoft Dynamics CRM users.”

But it was the test where a full Exchange Server 2007 environment supporting 4,000 users plus a full Microsoft Dynamics CRM environment supporting 3,000 users was combined onto a single Hyper-V server that commanded everyone’s attention. This included the application components for Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, as well as the simulated user load, database servers, and application servers. “Hyper-V on one Sun Fire x64 server supported Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, an environment that typically requires 16 servers,” says Cimprich. “With this kind of performance, there’s no doubt that Hyper-V is enterprise ready.”
 
Muhich and Schneider agreed. “We felt extremely comfortable standing behind our corporate strategy to virtualize everything—SQL Server 2008, Exchange Server 2007—all those applications people were saying just couldn’t be done,” says Schneider. “And the Microsoft support behind all the virtualization scenarios we are planning gave us additional comfort.”
 
Avanade decided to standardize its virtualization solution on Sun Fire X4150 servers with dual-socket, quad-core Intel processors, 64 gigabytes (GB) of RAM, and eight internal drives in a one rack unit form-factor. The company purchased eight of these servers and chose to deploy Hyper-V in a high availability, multi-node quick failover cluster that is built on Windows Server 2008 and uses the iSCSI storage area network protocol.

“Sun hardware boosted our memory capacity considerably, so we were able to take advantage of up to 64 GB of memory in a single unit box,” adds Muhich. “The Sun Fire X4150 is an ideal platform for running I/O intensive workloads such as Exchange Server 2007 and SQL Server 2008 in a virtualized environment.”

Deploying High Availability Clusters

Avanade chose the new Server Core installation option of Windows Server because of its significantly reduced attack surface and the reduced need for rebooting. Server Core allows for installation of server roles with only the necessary components and subsystems without a graphical user interface. Fewer roles and features means minimizing disk and service footprints while reducing attack surfaces.

“Even though we are deploying high availability clusters, we didn’t want to have to reboot our nodes,” explains Schneider. “And with just the server core, it’s ridiculously fast to install. It took 10 minutes to boot the server, pull down the image, and log in. After configuring all four servers for our first cluster, I had a script for the process. People talk about the command line interface, but we have some strong scripting talent on our team and can still manage the system with all the graphical management tools remotely, as long as we have connection to the server.”
 
To begin, Avanade deployed two four-node clusters, one for its test and development environment and one for its production environment. In production, the cluster hosts approximately 20 workloads, running between 1 and 4 GB of RAM in each child partition, including Microsoft Visual Studio® Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server integrated collaboration server, Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007, and Terminal Services. “We are hosting a next-generation Microsoft Exchange Server system in our lab and are currently running 10 virtual machines per host,” says Schneider. Avanade also acquired two new servers to perform a proof-of-concept for a new disaster-recovery solution at a different location. It’s a two-node cluster, also running Server Core on Sun Fire X4150 servers.”

Avanade plans to deploy Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to perform physical to virtual conversions, save virtual machine definition as templates in a central library, and perform quick migration of virtual machines between servers. “As soon as System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 becomes available, we’ll be using it as a key element of the entire System Center suite of tools to better manage our virtualized environment,” says Schneider.  

Benefits

Since deploying Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V virtualization technology in June 2008, Avanade has experienced tangible business benefits. With Hyper-V, Avanade established an enterprise-wide, scalable virtualization program, enabling the company to execute on business goals, such as improving its disaster-recovery solution and reducing data center costs. Avanade also uses the new virtualization solution to streamline the test and development environment so that IT is more responsive to the needs of the business, resulting in a more agile organization.

Virtualized Workloads

With the high performance of Hyper-V combined with the improved memory and connectivity  options within Sun x64 servers, Avanade can proceed with its business plans to virtualize as many workloads as possible while still achieving a level of performance comparable to a native operating system. “Before, we asked, ‘Can we get away with virtualizing this workload?’ and now we are saying, ‘Do we have to make it physical’?” says Muhich. “Thanks to Hyper-V, the default deployment scenario is that everything at Avanade will be virtualized. As we hit our depreciation life cycle over servers, we’ll be replacing each box with a Hyper-V host machine that’s going to run several workloads.”

Thanks to Hyper-V, the default deployment scenario is that everything at Avanade will be virtualized. Dave Muhich Operations Architect, Avanade

This represents a paradigm shift for the IT department, one that Schneider is happy to evangelize. “The other day I overhead a project team meeting in progress. They were all saying, ‘Where are we going to find the hardware for this?’ and ‘Where are we going to get a server for that?’ I just popped my head in the door and said, ‘It doesn’t matter, it’s going to be virtualized!’”

Avanade also plans to move forward with its disaster-recovery solution. Its existing high availability cluster already improves reliability for individual workloads in production. The cluster itself becomes a scalable, standardized building block for deployment in different scenarios, such as a disaster-recovery data center. “Until now, we didn’t have a full failover data-recovery solution,” says Muhich. “So instead of manually performing time-consuming backups, we plan to use Hyper-V to replicate the high availability clusters that we have in production, only in a different location. The Sun Fire X4150’s redundant hot-swappable power supplies and disk drives only add to these capabilities. And we can use System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to quickly set up and migrate virtual machines between locations.”

Improved Business Agility

With a significantly streamlined test and development environment, the Avanade IT department and the offshore development team can quickly respond to business demands. Instead of spending weeks waiting for server delivery and installation, the two teams spend only a few minutes deploying a virtual machine and provisioning a test environment.

“Hyper-V has eliminated the performance problems in the test arena, so we can more accurately compare test and production environments that involve 64-bit operating systems,” says Schneider. “Server build outs and tear downs are a thing of the past. Our offshore team can work with a virtual machine hosted here in Seattle on our Hyper-V test cluster, and we can refresh the environment quickly. Now it only takes a couple hours to have a physical host up and running, and I can deploy a virtual machine in five or 10 minutes. This will significantly reduce our time to deployment for new solutions going into production, making Avanade a more agile organization.”

And with the addition of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and System Center Operations Manager 2007, the Avanade IT staff can build a virtual machine template library and a self-provisioning Web site for developers to check in and checkout virtual machines based on predetermined resource allocations. “Completely automating this process will not only save more time for everyone, but it will also provide a base line image and standard for all our virtual machines,” says Muhich. “And with System Center Operations Manager 2007 alerting us when virtual machines are exceeding their RAM or CPU utilization and having the intelligence to move workloads around to optimize performance, we are looking forward to a more dynamic data center.”

Reduced Data Center Costs

As soon as Avanade begins performing physical to virtual conversions with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, the company expects significant savings. Looking ahead over a five-year period, the company expects to avoid rack-space growth, slow storage growth by 58 percent, and avoid $835,000 in hardware depreciation expenses and rack space charges.

“Avanade’s rapid growth over the past several years created an IT challenge,” says Dale Christian, Chief Information Officer at Avanade. “Yet major hardware and software innovations from Sun Microsystems and Microsoft allowed our company to dramatically compress our data center. Sun x64 servers are more powerful than our existing servers, but are configured to fit in a one rack unit. Hyper-V technology helps us run many virtual servers on a single cluster with performance nearly equal to a ‘native’ operating system. The result is a powerhouse of performance, manageability, and scalability.”

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

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 Sun Microsystems products and services visit the Web site at:
www.sun.com

For more information about Avanade products and services, call (206) 239-5600 or visit the Web site at:
www.avanade.com