Perth and Kinross Council wanted a more cost-effective delivery environment for its growing portfolio of citizen-centric services, some of which required multiple servers consuming large amounts of electricity. The council decided to evaluate a virtualisation strategy where multiple, software-based servers are stored on a single machine. It joined the rapid deployment programme for the Windows Server® 2008 operating system with Hyper-V™ technology for a clustered virtualisation solution spanning its two main sites. The council forecasts that in the first year it will save £100,000 (U.S.$152,000) compared to the cost of buying new physical servers. Its carbon footprint has improved with annual power savings of 350,000 kilowatt hours of electricity equating to an annual cost saving of £26,000 and 151 tonnes less in carbon dioxide emissions from April 2009.

Council (Slough BC), the governing authority for the borough of Slough, England, needed to expand its municipal services but faced data center space and power constraints for servers and storage resources. Slough BC has used the Windows Server® 2008 Datacenter operating system and Hyper-V™ virtualization technology to reduce its physical server count so it can accommodate new servers in support of new municipal services. Using Hyper-V technology, Slough BC has reduced data center costs, repurposed power capacity to install a larger storage area network, and improved its disaster readiness. Virtual machine performance has been exceptional, and CPU utilization is much higher with multiple virtual machines on a single host. The council now uses Microsoft® System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to manage its virtualization landscape.

NetBenefit is a leading provider of managed hosting services in the United Kingdom. Faced with ever more expensive London data center costs, the company was looking for ways to expand the hosting solutions it offered its clients while maximizing data center space. NetBenefit decided to implement the Windows Server® 2008 operating system featuring Hyper-V™ virtualization technology to give it the ability to create competitively priced entry-level virtual machines to complement its existing managed hosting services. The company is also using Microsoft® System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to simplify virtual machine management. Using Hyper-V, NetBenefit can maximize its data center space, reduce server management work, and enhance customer data security by adding an extra layer of protection to its underlying server hardware.

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.

Siemens Standard Drives is a manufacturing wing of the global electronics company Siemens. The company’s servers were increasing in number, but physical space and power were in short supply, and management was becoming difficult. It was running a VMware virtualization solution, but the cost was prohibitive, so the IT team worked with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Silversands to deploy Hyper-V™ technology, saving money, space, and energy.