University of Miami

University Cuts Costs, Improves Performance, Speeds Provisioning with Virtualization

The University of Miami (UM) is one of the leading research universities in the United States. With a server infrastructure that exceeded its facility’s capacity and required the use of valuable resources to administer, the 10 IT staff in UM’s enterprise Windows server group needed to consolidate servers and streamline management. Now it is running Windows Server® 2008 with Hyper-V™, migrating VMware Server and Microsoft® Virtual Server 2005 to the Hyper-V technology, and using Microsoft System Center products to manage, monitor, and back up its environment. As a result, UM cut data center space and power requirements, realized 80 percent savings in energy costs compared to its previous nonvirtualized environment, enhanced utilization of physical servers, slashed virtual server deployment time from hours to minutes, and enabled a more robust disaster recovery plan.

 

Situation

The University of Miami (UM), a not-for-profit academic institution, is the largest private employer in Miami-Dade County. More than 13,000 faculty and staff serve more than 15,000 students at 12 colleges and schools, which are spread across five campuses. As one of the leading research universities in the United States, UM places a high value on creating new knowledge and taking advantage of technology to ensure excellence in education.

Part of UM’s central IT department, the enterprise Windows server group is made up of 10 staff who support the university’s Windows®−based infrastructure. In addition to managing  servers, the team is responsible for supporting wide-ranging Microsoft® technologies, including the Active Directory® service and SQL Server® data management software, and for providing services to end users. “We have many more responsibilities than you would expect a systems group to have and, therefore, we’re always looking for ways to simplify our IT processes,” says Manuel Garriga, Senior Systems Administrator for the UM Enterprise Windows Server Group.

The team’s responsibilities include consolidating and streamlining the management of servers. “The more servers you have, the more difficult it is to monitor, maintain correct levels of patching, and keep everything operational,” adds Walter Bechtel, Assistant Vice President of Information Technology at UM.

The team was also challenged by constraints outside its areas of responsibility, including server rack space, A/C cooling thresholds, and power. “This was a real concern for us because we were growing at a pace that outstripped our facility planning. We developed the latest plan seven years ago and, although it was supposed to take us through 10 years of growth, we were already bumping up against limitations. All of this pointed to the fact that there had to be a better, more efficient way to run our shop,” Bechtel explains.

Due to user demands, UM was facing time-to-deployment and time-to-respond challenges. “When you operate in a fast-paced world like we do, the ability to set aside time to plan is often a luxury,” says Bechtel.

In the past, it could take the group several weeks to order, receive, configure, rack, and deploy physical servers. “We wanted to be able to respond faster and ensure that, rather than being a barrier to getting projects deployed—particularly unplanned ones—we could accelerate the process,” Garriga adds.

All of the team’s challenges were exacerbated by today’s trying economic climate. Like universities throughout the United States, UM is facing budget constraints that are driving its departments, including IT, to reduce costs. It needed a solution that would help reduce data center requirements, accelerate deployments, and streamline management in the most cost-effective way possible.

Solution

The University of Miami enterprise Windows server group realized that virtualization could help it meet all of its needs and began to deploy a solution in 2004. “We’re essentially a Microsoft shop, but at the time—about five years ago—Microsoft didn’t have a virtualization solution for this, so we implemented VMware GSX,” Garriga says. “It was an eye-opening experience and led us to want to virtualize even more of our infrastructure.”

When Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 became available, UM’s enterprise Windows server group quickly implemented it alongside its existing VMware GSX servers. Not too long afterward, the team was faced with another decision: “We wanted to expand our virtualization environment and had several choices. We could continue with one of the first-generation host-based virtualization technologies—Virtual Server or GSX, or move to a VMware ESX hypervisor–based solution, which was available at the time, or wait for Hyper-V™, which we knew would be coming out in a few years,” says Garriga. 
 

Microsoft virtualization solutions cost us 60 percent less than VMware. They help us save money today while giving us the capabilities needed to operate even more efficiently and cost-effectively as time goes on. Walter Bechtel Assistant Vice President, Information Technology, University of Miami

“We’re growing constantly, but our budgets don’t always expand at the same rate as our operations. Therefore, my goal is to extract as much value as possible from our environment. When Microsoft aggressively entered the virtualization space, it actually appeared to drive vendors like VMware to cut prices and even offer products for free, which would speak to the tremendous influence Microsoft has on the market,” says Bechtel. However, UM needed to choose a virtualization platform that would deliver the greatest value and the best fit over time.  “When we compared Microsoft and VMware from cost, integration, and companion product perspectives, it was clear that Microsoft delivered a much better value than VMware,” notes Bechtel.

The licensing options were also better with Microsoft. Garriga explains, “We didn’t want to pay the very high VMware licensing fees for functionality like backups and VMotion. When Microsoft announced the Microsoft System Center suite—and made it all available under one license—we knew that combining these products with Hyper-V would give us tremendous functionality at a cost that was much lower than the fleshed-out VMware configuration.”

The Microsoft software was also attractive from a technology perspective. According to Garriga, “At the time, VMware Server supported 64-bit virtual machines and Virtual Server did not. However, that wasn’t enough of a driver for us. We could always use VMware to satisfy 64-bit guests when required. But, even though we knew we needed additional capabilities, we didn’t want to move ahead with VMware ESX because we didn’t want to get into the large iron that would be required to extract 100 percent of its functionality.”

The team decided to use VMware GSX (now called VMware Server) and Virtual Server until the 64-bit version of the Windows Server® 2008 Datacenter operating system with the Hyper-V technology was available. With Hyper-V, the team could make the best use of its server hardware investments by consolidating multiple server roles as separate virtual machines running on a single physical machine. In addition, the team decided to use System Center Virtual Machine Manager to streamline management of the environment and enable team members to respond quickly to user demands. It also wanted to use the product’s Intelligent Placement feature to help optimize server utilization. UM joined the Windows Server Virtualization/Hyper-V, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, and System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 Technology Adoption Programs (TAPs) through Microsoft, and then began the implementations.  

Initially, in the first quarter of 2008, UM used two Hyper-V hosts running the latest pre-release builds for new capacity in test environments. “As we moved to Release Candidate 2 of Hyper-V, we began migrating existing capacity. We moved a couple of VMware and seven Virtual Server virtual machines to Hyper-V, and had great success,” Garriga says. When the production releases of Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager became available, Garriga explains that UM began putting “more significant, I/O [input/output]-intensive loads on Hyper-V because we had confidence in Hyper-V and the great management tools from Virtual Machine Manager.” For instance, UM runs production SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 workloads on Hyper-V. 

Because UM’s enterprise Windows server group uses Windows Server 2008 Datacenter, it can run an unlimited number of virtual guests per licensed server. “The Datacenter licensing model enables us to provision, relocate, and decommission Windows virtual machines without concern over tracking the allocation of Windows licenses,” Garriga explains.

UM has one instance of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008; seven Hyper-V hosts housing 54 Windows guests and two additional test Hyper-V hosts running a fluctuating number of guests; and four Virtual Server 2005 virtual machine hosts with 31 Windows guests plus one test host whose number of guests varies. UM plans to expand the number of Hyper-V virtual machines to 100 during the next year, effectively doubling its current capacity.

“Whereas in the past we had pockets of virtualization in a land of physical servers, in the future we’ll have pockets of physical machines in a largely virtual landscape,” Garriga notes.

UM uses System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 SP1 to back up virtual and physical servers and enable an effective disaster recovery (DR) plan. “We're able to support much more frequent recovery points for our SQL Server, Exchange Server, and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 data sources. We are also taking advantage of the DR functionality in Data Protection Manager, which allows us to seamlessly replicate backup data to a server in a remote data center and fail over backups or restores to and from that DR server, should the primary server fail,” says Garriga.

UM relies on System Center Operations Manager 2007 SP1 to monitor and maintain service levels for its virtual and physical machines, and to “run herd over all the cats,” Garriga says. “We love the single-pane-of-glass view of our infrastructure, no matter where workloads are running, and find that Operations Manager has really enhanced our ability to proactively and reactively respond to both needs and disruptions. With just 10 staff managing 400 physical and virtual boxes—as well as supporting all our Microsoft enterprise technologies—we need Operations Manager to keep everything going. Operations Manager is like having a junior systems administrator who never sleeps. It’s always on top of things.” Using Operations Manager, the team can run metrics on the virtual machine loads to ensure that its hosts can efficiently handle them. The team is also planning to deploy System Center Configuration Manager 2007 to help with updating cycles and compliance.

UM uses Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services to deliver key applications with enhanced security—including System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Operations Manager—to the team’s administrators for Web browser scenarios.

Benefits

Using an integrated Microsoft virtualization solution, the University of Miami was able to increase host utilization, reduce costs and space requirements, accelerate deployments, and plan for more robust disaster recovery. 

Reduced Energy Costs

UM has been able to address the energy and space limitations that it was encountering due to continued growth—and save money in the process. According to Garriga, “At our current consolidation rate, we’re realizing an energy savings of 80 percent, even when we account for power draw and cooling requirements. For example, one of our virtual machine hosts draws 446 watts of power and requires 134 watts for cooling, whereas the eliminated physical hosts would draw 3349 watts and require 1005 watts for cooling. We expect our savings will increase as our consolidation rates increase.”

Bechtel adds, “When we began looking at power consumption figures, we realized that we saved $6,000 in three years in power alone.”
 
”When we’re able to put 10 to 12 virtual machines on a 2-U server in the data center—where physical space is a premium—we know we’re getting value from our investment in terms of both space and power," explains Garriga.

Decreased Server and Licensing Costs

By migrating to virtual machines, the UM team also decreased the number of physical servers. It is currently running 27 production virtual machine guests, which would otherwise have been physical servers, on just three physical hosts, saving U.S.$35,000 in server acquisition costs and freeing up more data center space.

When we began looking at power consumption figures, we realized that we saved $6,000 in three years in power alone. Walter Bechtel Assistant Vice President, Information Technology, University of Miami

“Although we are averaging 10 virtual machines per IT-owned Hyper-V host, we expect this to increase to 20 virtual machines per host. At our current consolidation rate, we are saving 40 percent by purchasing two Datacenter edition licenses compared to purchasing 11 individual Windows Server licenses. As we increase our consolidation rate to 20 virtual machines per host, we will hit 68 percent savings,” adds Garriga.

In addition to its two Windows Server 2008 Datacenter licenses, UM has a System Center Server Management Suite Datacenter (SMSD) license, which covers System Center Operations Manager 2007 SP1, System Center Configuration Manager 2007, System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 SP1, and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, as well as the right to manage an unlimited number of operating system environments on a single physical server. Bechtel says, “System Center SMSD provides us with tremendous value since we get a sweeping license for the System Center products on a per-host, rather than virtual machine, basis. By licensing one host, we also get the suite for all the guests.”

Garriga adds, “Most competing products that we owned or evaluated charge per-virtual-machine licensing fees, multiplying the cost advantage that SMSD provides. For instance, the agent cost for the backup solution we used in the past cost us much more than what we’re paying now. SMSD is 65 percent cheaper, and we get the added benefit of all the great System Center products for that price.”   

Implementing Hyper-V along with the System Center SMSD also saved money compared to implementing VMware Infrastructure Enterprise Edition with Virtual Center Management Server and Platinum support for those products. “Microsoft virtualization solutions cost us 60 percent less than VMware. They help us save money today while giving us the capabilities needed to operate even more efficiently and cost-effectively as time goes on,” Bechtel explains.

UM uses direct attached storage, instead of a storage area network (SAN), for all the virtual machines on its hosts. “We’re extremely cost-sensitive, and this enables us to spend one-fifth of what a SAN would cost us,” Garriga says.

“We’ve always had an eye towards frugality, and in these economic times, focusing on cost savings is even more important,” Bechtel emphasizes.

Optimized Data Center Utilization

Using System Center Virtual Machine Manager, UM now consistently reaches 40 percent utilization on its physical servers and conservatively predicts it will exceed 70 percent when the hosts are fully populated. “I can pull up the performance of any host and determine whether there’s head room to migrate virtual machines onto it. The Intelligent Placement capability makes it easy to increase utilization rates by recommending which hosts have the capacity to handle which virtual machines. It’s pretty darn cool,” Garriga says. Given that UM’s previous hardware utilization rates aligned with the industry standard of 10 to 25 percent utilization, “this is a great increase,” he adds.

Cut Deployment Time from Hours to Minutes

In the past, it often took several weeks to deploy a new physical machine. Using virtual machines helped accelerate this process. Before it had System Center Virtual Machine Manager, the UM team “was able to provision a Virtual Server virtual machine in about three hours, using elbow grease,” Garriga says. Now, with Virtual Machine Manager, IT can provision a new virtual machine in just 15 minutes.

“I can migrate from physical to virtual machines and from virtual to virtual machines quickly and reliably. We can be much more nimble now and respond faster to changing needs,” adds Garriga. “The time savings and flexibility that we get from using the Virtual Machine Manager library templates, storing those images, and deploying standardized, known configurations, are fantastic.” The UM team also hopes to use the product’s self-service provisioning and quota-based capabilities to enable people outside of its group to deploy and change virtual machines themselves. After it first establishes business processes for bill-back procedures, the team expects that moving some of these tasks outside the team will help users gain even more in time savings.

Enable Robust Disaster Recovery

Because of its location in southern Florida, UM faces the possibility of significant regional disasters from hurricanes and storms. It’s not uncommon for it to experience extended power outages. The team already uses System Center Data Protection Manager in its DR plan. It is also looking at clustering with Hyper-V to extend its DR solution.

“With Data Protection Manager, we can recover our most critical systems to virtual machines on any brand server by just loading up Hyper-V,” Bechtel explains. “Having guest-level availability without having to rack physical boxes, and having spare capacity on physical boxes that is readily accessible, is great for disaster recovery.  At our most hardened data center, we currently have spare capacity that can house up to 30 guest systems.  We are, therefore, ready to relocate workloads from other centers in the event of a disruption.”

Garriga adds, “Before virtualization, we could not afford to have spare, unused hardware waiting at a co-location facility and, if we did, we could only recover one application/tier per spare.  With Hyper-V we can co-locate virtualization capacity and simply budget to retain unused capacity or plan to shut down low priority virtual machines in order to provide flexible capacity for a recovery scenario.”

“Microsoft delivers the capabilities we need at a great value. Just as important, we know that whatever Microsoft solutions we use today will get even richer with each new iteration,” Garriga concludes. “We’re very happy with how our investments in Microsoft virtualization technologies have played out so far, and are confident that we’ll continue to get great returns in the future.”

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 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

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For more information about the University of Miami, call 305-284-2211 or visit the Web site at:
www.miami.edu