Jefferson County Public Schools

School District Virtualizes Aging Servers, Saves $200,000

Based in Louisville, Jefferson County Public Schools is the largest school district in the state of Kentucky. Operating in an economic downturn, the district felt pressure to reduce costs without affecting classroom learning. The IT department responded by looking for a solution to contain server sprawl, standardize a disparate server infrastructure across more than 150 schools, and centralize IT management. To achieve these goals, it deployed the Windows Server® 2008 Datacenter operating system and the Hyper-V™ virtualization technology. To date, it has reduced physical servers by 10 percent in remote locations and 30 percent in the data center. The IT staff is using Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to administer the district’s centralized IT server infrastructure more efficiently. With the money saved, the district can reallocate funds to more strategic initiatives. 

 

Situation

Jefferson County Public Schools operates 155 schools and learning centers in Kentucky’s most populous county. The district was recognized in 2008 when four of its schools were included on the U.S. News and World Report 2008 list of best high schools in the United States. Faculty and staff all share a core belief that student success depends on high-performance learning environments that inspire and empower students to be successful, lifelong learners.

One way the district aims to create high-performance learning environments is through the power of technology. Consequently, Jefferson County Public Schools wants to expand its technology infrastructure and support services to students, parents, and staff. By offering better technology resources, the district hopes to encourage teachers to become adept at incorporating software and hardware into their classroom practices in ways that increase student engagement and understanding. Yet the current economic climate has cast a shadow over the attainment of these goals, forcing the district to examine ways it can streamline expenses across the board, including IT.

One area that IT looked at closely was its IT infrastructure. Over the years, the IT infrastructure at Jefferson County Public Schools had evolved in a decentralized way, which introduced a host of inefficiencies, duplicate efforts, and unnecessary costs.

We are using our Microsoft virtualization solution to get us where we need to be, reducing IT costs and reallocating funds where they are most needed—in the classroom to improve learning. Whitney Roberts Disaster Recovery Administrator, Jefferson County Public Schools

“Historically, there has been at least one server in each of our 155 schools,” explains Whitney Roberts, Disaster Recovery Administrator at Jefferson County Public Schools. “At every school, IT employees acquire hardware and software from a statewide purchasing vehicle. They also manage the servers and perform school-level administration. For the district, this older model of having the servers in the schools was no longer sustainable.”

Although file and print services were hosted on all the remote servers, each school had hardware of varying ages and a diverse set of software depending on the unique needs of each student population. IT staff turnover at the schools made it even more difficult to adhere to diverse IT management policies and ensure that security policies were followed. “We lacked an overriding standard for our IT infrastructure and the procurement cycles of our environment make it difficult to introduce management efficiencies by standardizing on a single hardware platform,” says Roberts. “We had limited centralized management tools, which forced IT staff to manually perform the same tasks at each physical location.” 

Growing demand for storage on both the remote and data center servers had become a big issue for a school district the size of Jefferson County Public Schools. Tracking and storing 100,000 students’ records over 12 years strained the district’s IT budget. Storage needed by human resources, finance, and other departmental systems, as well student information systems and e-mail retention requirements, only added to the burden. In the past, the IT department had responded by supplying siloed storage on each server, which solved the individual problem at hand, but made it difficult to manage the district’s overall storage requirements.

Jefferson County Public Schools also needed to curtail the server sprawl. There are more than 300 Windows®-based servers in remote locations and the data center in Louisville, managed by a staff of more than 20 people. Rising energy and cooling costs were draining resources. Although the district has a dedicated team that tests district-level instructional software and other applications, team members were constrained by having to manually provision and tear down test environments.

“We were overspending on hardware and wasting IT resources trying to administer a decentralized environment,” says Roberts. “We needed to solve our server and storage utilization issues. Virtualization would help us consolidate and standardize our servers so that we could begin to centralize management and introduce operational efficiencies.”

Solution

Jefferson County Public Schools chose the Hyper-V™ virtualization technology that is part of the Windows Server® 2008 Datacenter operating system. Not only did the Microsoft solution offer the district all the functionality and scalability it needed to virtualize almost its entire server infrastructure, but it was the most cost-effective solution.

The district took advantage of the Microsoft® School Agreement signed by the state of Kentucky, which makes it very affordable to acquire Microsoft technologies. “We knew that Hyper-V would work best in our Microsoft-centric environment, so when we looked at the licensing advantages, the decision was easy,” says Roberts. “The money required for licensing a VMware solution, more than $100,000 for a solution on our scale, could be better used to support initiatives that improve classroom learning, or to support more value-added IT projects, such as building offsite disaster recovery capabilities.”  The district also would benefit from the licensing policies of Windows Server 2008 Datacenter, which offers unlimited guests without any additional licensing costs.

The IT department also liked the fact that it could use the Microsoft System Center suite of integrated management technologies to better manage its virtual and physical servers. In 2008, the district acquired Systems Center Operations Manager 2007 and Systems Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.  The district’s ambitious plans to virtualize as many of its servers as possible will not happen overnight. Having a single set of centralized tools that staff can use to monitor both physical and virtual environments will be a boon during the transition period.

In mid 2008, Jefferson County Public Schools began acquiring Dell Poweredge blade servers. Today, 36 are in place, ready to host almost all the district’s physical servers. “We began by performing a physical to virtual [P2V] conversion on the oldest servers that were drawing the most amount of power,” says Roberts.

At the same time, the district began working with an ipStor, storage solution from Falconstor to configure a storage area network (SAN) solution. “We are working to implement ipStor districtwide, so we can consolidate all our disparate storage,” adds Roberts. “Then we can make huge inroads in unifying storage area network management and storage provisioning.”

In October 2008, the district deployed System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to help with the P2V conversions. IT staff used the wizard-based interface to create the virtual machines in one step. Today, the district has virtualized 40 old servers from the remote locations and the data center. “With every new software purchase, we now determine if it can be virtualized,” says Roberts. “We have virtualized five new applications so far. This may sound like a low number to some, but it’s a paradigm shift for the district.”

The money required for licensing a VMware solution, more than $100,000 for a solution on our scale, could be better used to support district initiatives that improve classroom learning. Whitney Roberts Disaster Recovery Administrator, Jefferson County Public Schools

Roberts and his staff are also using System Center Operations Manager 2007 to collect performance statistics on its virtual machines. “So far, performance of our virtual machines has been almost equal to that of our physical servers,” says Roberts.  
 
In June 2008, the district deployed its first of four host failover clusters hosting 12 virtual machines into production. The IT team took advantage of the clustering capabilities in Windows Server 2008, such as a streamlined one-step installation process and full integration with the Volume Shadow Copy Service. The district is also beginning to virtualize its test and development environment. Currently, 10 offline virtual machines are available for developers. 

In total, the district has approximately 78 virtual machines at its data center, hosting everything from instructional software running on Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 database management software to Web servers running 64-bit workloads. The IT department is planning to virtualize the Microsoft Exchange Server environment, which has about 13,000 mailboxes, when it upgrades to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. Staff members are already discussing when to virtualize the district’s Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 solution. “We have a couple of older mainframe applications that are being rewritten as Microsoft .NET–connected applications, and they’ll also be hosted on virtualized Web servers,” adds Roberts.

The district is preparing now to upgrade to Windows Server 2008 R2. Roberts and the IT staff expect the number of failover clusters to increase from four to 12 once each blade is upgraded to the R2 version. The IT team is looking forward to using the Live Migration feature to move running virtual machines from one node to another within their Hyper-V failover clusters.

However, the most eagerly awaited benefit of Windows Server 2008 R2 is the Cluster Shared Volumes feature that IT staff can use to derive even more efficient use of the district’s storage solution. With Cluster Shared Volumes, clustered virtual machines that are distributed across multiple cluster nodes can all access their Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) files at the same time, even if the VHD files are on a single disk in the storage.

“Using Cluster Shared Volumes, we don’t have to pre-allocate a tremendous amount of storage upfront for each one of the virtual machines: instead we can allocate as we go,” says Roberts. “That’s huge for us because otherwise we would have to pay for and set aside a lot of storage that may not be used for six months or a year.”

Benefits

Jefferson County Public Schools is the first school district in the state of Kentucky to use a Microsoft virtualization and integrated server management solution to reduce IT costs. With every dollar saved through server and storage consolidation and improved, centralized IT management over a standardized infrastructure, the district has more money available for projects that directly affect learning outcomes.

Jefferson County Public Schools is benefitting from reduced data center costs, a standardized infrastructure, and simplified IT management. 

Reduced Data Center Costs

The most immediate cost savings for the district came from server consolidation. “With Hyper-V, we have already saved $200,000 in hardware costs, and that’s just by targeting our oldest physical servers,” says Roberts.

The district also is poised to save a significant amount of money on electrical and cooling costs. Roberts estimates that the IT team will have fully deployed its storage virtualization solution in the next six to nine months, after which it can achieve the goal of virtualizing the majority of its servers. “We’re not at the point where we can see a reduction in electrical costs because we are deploying blades as fast as we are turning physical machines off,” says Roberts. “We are planning to virtualize as much as is viable and makes sense, so we are expecting to see the energy costs for the data center reduced significantly. We’re talking about turning off racks of servers, not just one at a time, and moving from a few hundred servers to maybe 50.”

Standardized, Security-Enhanced IT Infrastructure

As the IT department consolidates servers in the data center, the district can standardize its IT infrastructure and boost security. “We are using Hyper-V to move from approximately 155 disparate server ‘islands’ to a central, standardized virtual infrastructure with better performance and scalability,” says Roberts. “And as we move our aging, disparate servers into the virtual environment, we can take advantage of a new workload security model that allows us to tightly define who are the administrators of specific servers and workloads, eliminating the ‘all for one, and one for all’ mentality of the past.”

Simplified IT Management

By bringing edge servers back to the data center as virtualized workloads where they can be managed centrally with integrated Microsoft tools, the district has initiated a paradigm shift in infrastructure management at Jefferson County Public Schools. Now the district can create district-wide management policies and monitor the physical and virtual environment more efficiently as a whole. IT employees are using System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to gain a comprehensive view of all virtual machines in the environment, to perform P2V migrations in hours instead of days, and to store and manage offline virtual machines and templates.

“System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 has played a central role in our virtualization initiatives, both for the production and test and development environments,” says Roberts. “We delegated developer access to the self-service Web portal so that developers and workload owners can manage their own virtual machines. It was great to be able to say to people who were uncomfortable about us virtualizing their workloads, ‘OK, here is a Web site where you can log in and manage your server just like you used to. You can connect remotely to your server, and you can go online and power your server down or power it up’.”

In the test and development environment, developers are using the template library within System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to store and manage offline virtual machines as preconfigured templates. “Now if we need a virtual machine quickly, it’s a simple matter for our developers to quickly configure and deploy one from existing templates,” says Roberts.

Streamlined management contributes to increased agility within the IT department. Staff members throughout the district are starting to take notice of a new level of responsiveness from the IT staff. “Our user base doesn’t have to be concerned with the difference between a physical and a virtual machine; all they care about is how reliable and responsive their applications are,” says Roberts. “Hyper-V is helping the IT department at the district to gain a reputation for being agile and reliable. Staff members are commenting on our ability to rapidly deploy new initiatives such as the latest instructional software, based on the fact that we can have a new virtual machine up and running in minutes.

“We are at the beginning of a long journey,” Roberts concludes.  “We are using our Microsoft virtualization solution to get us where we need to be, reducing IT costs and reallocating funds where they are most needed—in the classroom to improve learning.”

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 Web site for virtualization:
www.microsoft.com/education/solutions/virtualization.aspx  

For More Information

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For more information about Jefferson County Public Schools, call (502) 485-3011 or visit the Web site at:
www.jefferson.k12.ky.us