The Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts in the United Kingdom educates students in the most innovative forms of performing arts, as well as related design, management, and technology. But what the institute needed was innovation in its technology infrastructure, which was expanding quickly and becoming increasingly unmanageable and costly. After trying server virtualization with VMware, the institute moved to a Microsoft Virtualization solution. It has increased overall IT productivity by 100 percent, with its two-person IT staff managing twice as many virtual machines as before. With Microsoft Virtualization, costs are 90 percent less than they would have been for VMware. The institute also has achieved high availability and business continuity for systems that will support students, faculty, and staff for years to come.

Situation
At the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA), Ben Faulkner—Information Communication Technology Officer—manages the institute’s rapidly expanding technology infrastructure, which has grown to 28 computer servers, with the assistance of just one colleague.

The IT infrastructure growth had taken place for good reason. The institute, co-founded by Sir Paul McCartney, had expanded rapidly since it opened in 1996, and it has become one of the United Kingdom’s most prominent institutions for training in performing and community arts, dance, theatre and performance design, and sound technology and management disciplines. As LIPA broadened its offerings, it needed an increasing number of software applications, many of which required their own servers. The server population grew by 50 percent over five years. The institute couldn’t achieve economies of scale when many computer servers sat underutilized, each running a single application. Plus, managing them had become a strain.

“The environment had become too large, and we were continuing to buy server after server,” says Faulkner. “Given that we also had to support all the technology needs of our students, faculty, and staff, it was getting chaotic. We wanted a more manageable system.”

LIPA also needed a more cost-effective system. “The cost of buying and maintaining servers had grown so much that it was having an impact on the operational budget of the institute,” says Faulkner. “And we were continuing to get demands from faculty and staff for additional services. We had to address the cost of serving these growing needs before it got completely out of hand.”

While LIPA wanted a system that cost less and that took less time and effort to manage, it also wanted more availability. Given the schedules of students and performing artists, the LIPA facility had always operated on a 24 hours a day, seven days a week schedule. The increasing availability of high-bandwidth Internet access meant that students could work online even with massive design files—as long as the institute made those files available.

“The students had very high expectations of our system and the services that should always be available to them,” says Faulkner. “Whenever there was downtime, no matter how brief, we would get complaints. So we wanted a way to mitigate downtime as much as possible.”

Despite its large and growing number of computer servers, the system lacked features that would promote high availability, such as redundancy and failover clustering. It also lacked the technologies it needed for backup and business continuity. LIPA backed up its servers nightly, but the backup window was extending into the morning and interfering with system access by students, faculty, and administrators. The business continuity plan called for the system to recover from a full disaster within 14 days, which was an unacceptably long time.

Administrators were also concerned about the energy consumed by the increasing numbers of computers, given that LIPA was environmentally conscious and promoted the use of “green technology” in the performing arts industry. However, the institute failed to meet these standards in its own technology infrastructure.

“We couldn’t continue in this vein,” says Faulkner.

Solution
By 2006, addressing the issues with its technology environment had become a priority for LIPA. Virtualization—in which several logical or software-based servers could reside on a single physical server or host—seemed a way to achieve the institute’s goals for easier management, reduced costs, higher availability, and disaster recovery.

With the size of our environment doubling, we couldn’t have continued to manage it with two people without Hyper-V. Ben Faulkner Information Communication Technology Officer, Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts

LIPA chose to virtualize on VMware, and it moved its workloads to 14 virtual machines running on two physical hosts. The physical hosts ran the VMware ESXi hypervisor, a free download from the VMware website, giving the institute the lower total cost of ownership that it sought. What LIPA didn’t get with VMware was manageability, high availability, and disaster recovery. Virtual machines on one host couldn’t be moved easily to the other host. That ruled out the ability to have redundant or failover systems that could substitute for each other in the event that one host ceased to function, or needed to be taken down temporarily for servicing. It also eliminated the possibility of load balancing the virtual machines between the physical hosts to increase availability. Meeting these expectations would have required LIPA to upgrade to a fee-based version of VMware.

Finding a Better Solution
By the end of 2009, LIPA was again looking for a virtualization solution to fulfill its expectations. This time it found it.

The institute began this search by seeking a solution provider that could guide it to a successful choice. LIPA chose Gardner Systems. The provider had helped LIPA acquire a NetApp storage area network (SAN) device that was originally destined for the institute’s VMware servers, and now it helped with a new virtualization solution. The recommendation from Gardner was to look to Microsoft Virtualization.

Since the institute’s initial product evaluation three years earlier, Microsoft had released the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system with Hyper-V virtualization technology. Faulkner and his IT department colleague looked at the Microsoft path to virtualization, and liked what they saw. The features they needed for virtualization management are included in Hyper-V, which comes as part of Windows Server 2008 R2 without additional charge; with VMware, they would need to pay licensing fees for a similar set of capabilities. Better manageability, availability, and business continuity, along with lower cost, were all possible with the Microsoft option.

Choosing the “Essentials”
The migration to Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter with Hyper-V was planned for the summer of 2010, to minimize the impact on users. Although LIPA allotted 15 days for setup and configuration of the NetApp SAN and migration of 14 virtual servers and two physical servers, the process took only four days. The migration was expedited by using Microsoft System Center Essentials 2010, which includes most of the virtualization management functionality of Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, with a user interface designed for maximum ease of use.

“We chose System Center Essentials because it was a great, highly cost-effective way for us, given our situation as a midsized organization, to get the management features we wanted,” says Faulkner. “We used it for the migration and, now, we use it to manage both our virtual environment and the systems that run in the physical environment.”

The migration, of course, required Gardner and LIPA to bring the VMware virtual machines into the Hyper-V environment. Because of specific management capabilities lacking in VMware, they could not use the virtual-to-virtual (V2V) capability in System Center Essentials. Instead, they accomplished the migration using the software’s physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration capability.

“It took only about 15 minutes to migrate each virtual machine,” says Faulkner. “It all happened with a few mouse clicks, and it was done.”

It took only about 15 minutes to migrate each virtual machine. It all happened with a few mouse clicks, and it was done. Ben Faulkner Information Communication Technology Officer, Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts

Gardner and LIPA brought all the virtual machines into a single physical host, a two-processor Dell PowerEdge R710 server that was already part of the institute’s network. Then, they created a second physical host, also using existing hardware, and spread the virtual machines across the two physical hosts, which became two nodes in a clustered configuration.

This structure—along with Cluster Shared Volumes technology and Live Migration capability in Hyper-V and managed through System Center Essentials—supports the high availability that the institute wants. Planned movements of workloads from one host to another can be accomplished without any disruption or downtime. Unplanned movements in response to a physical host failure can be accomplished in seconds.

Backup and business continuity are based on hourly system snapshots carried out by the institute’s NetApp SAN device. The institute chose NetApp for its SAN device to take advantage of its interoperability with Microsoft technology, its snapshot technology for backup and recovery, and its unified protocol platform for effective data access. LIPA is now adding a third physical host to the cluster, to support the continued virtualization of its workloads and to increase the high-availability capability.

Benefits
The Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts has achieved its technology goals with its adoption of a Microsoft Virtualization solution based on Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V technology. The environment is faster and easier to manage, costs have been reduced, and high availability and business continuity contribute to increased reliability.

Server Provisioning Time Reduced by 75 Percent; Overall Productivity up 100 Percent
Faulkner and LIPA wanted to streamline the management of their environment. They’ve accomplished that with the move to Hyper-V.

“Hyper-V and System Center Essentials have freed us from much of the daily management tasks we had before,” says Faulkner. “The Virtual Machine Manager capabilities built into System Center Essentials are very intuitive. I learned it as I was creating the cluster, with just a brief product overview from Gardner. My ICT colleague Mark Pritchard and I both find it easy, quick, and efficient to work with.”

As an example of this efficiency, Faulkner cites the process of provisioning a new virtual machine, which requires accounting for disk space, CPU, memory, and other factors. Previously, it took him approximately 45 minutes to provision a virtual machine, and he had to monitor the process throughout that time. Now, using System Center Essentials and its templates and library functionality, he says that time has been cut by more than 75 percent, to 10 minutes. “That’s not just a savings of time,” says Faulkner. “Given the multiple demands on our time, that shorter provisioning process can make the difference between accommodating a sudden request or needing to wait until the next day.”

The increased manageability that comes with Microsoft virtualization technology has also made it possible for LIPA to manage a continually expanding environment without additional Information Communication Technology (ICT) staff. From the 14 virtual machines migrated from VMware to Hyper-V, LIPA has expanded the virtual environment to a total of 28 servers, which are still managed by just Faulkner and one colleague. He says that the ability to manage the expanded virtual environment with the same personnel represents a 100 percent productivity gain.

“We plan to have all of our workloads virtualized over the next 6 to 12 months,” says Faulkner. “You can take that as an indication of our satisfaction with Hyper-V. With the size of our environment doubling, we couldn’t have continued to manage it with two people without Hyper-V,” says Faulkner. “It’s definitely given us back hours that we can reinvest to manage the increasing load.”

Saves 90 Percent on Licensing Cost Compared to VMware
LIPA also looked to reduce the cost of its technology environment. Faulkner says the institute has accomplished that goal. When LIPA considered its options in upgrading or migrating from its VMware installation, it conducted a price comparison of software licensing for VMware vSphere v 4 and for Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter with Hyper-V technology. Both prices were based on a three-node cluster with two CPUs per node. For Windows Server with Hyper-V, the cost per node was just 10 percent of the cost of VMware. LIPA also acquired a low-cost license for System Center Essentials.

“We saved 90 percent of the price of VMware by going with Hyper-V,” says Faulkner. “And that just covers the cost of virtualization software licensing because, once we saw this, it was clear that Microsoft and Hyper-V were offering the best value for the money. So we never factored in the additional cost of the necessary Windows Server licenses had we gone with VMware.”

Faulkner attributes the price difference to several factors. First is the education discount that LIPA enjoys, thanks to its Campus Agreement with Microsoft. In addition, LIPA benefits from the favorable licensing model for virtual machines running on Windows Server and Hyper-V. Microsoft offers unlimited free virtual machine licenses with each license of Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter. The use of VMware would have incurred further costs to deliver the dynamic features that LIPA required. In addition to being less expensive for comparable environments, the Microsoft license model also gives LIPA the flexibility to add virtual machines to existing hosts as needed, and to move virtual machines from host to host, without incurring additional licensing charges.

High Availability Achieved; Uptime Near 100 Percent
LIPA wanted a solution with high availability to keep the servers running day and night for students. The institute has achieved this through Microsoft technologies including Live Migration and Cluster Shared Volumes.

Previously, LIPA had to take half of its virtual machines offline every time one of the two VMware ESXi host servers needed updating, so that the host server could be rebooted. The process could take up to 20 minutes each time. In contrast, when Hyper-V host servers need updating, their workloads can be live migrated to another physical host across the cluster; the host server is then updated and rebooted, and users work from the migrated virtual machine in the interim, without any perceptible downtime to users.

“Our availability, measured by unplanned downtime, is now close to 100 percent,” says Faulkner. “That meets our needs quite nicely—and should continue to do so for some time to come.”

The institute’s business continuity has also gained a boost from Hyper-V. In the event of an unresolvable outage, the system can be restored within an hour of the disruption. Previously, the institute could lose as much as a day’s worth of data. In addition, without the need to source, ship, and deploy replacement physical servers, the ICT Department’s service level agreement for disaster recovery has been slashed by 75 percent. LIPA is now looking to host its backup site over the Internet, with Gardner Systems. Faulkner expects the move to provide even faster data recovery, should it ever be needed.

Eliminated 23 Tons of Carbon Dioxide Emissions Per Year
The institute even promotes its goal of conserving energy and reducing its carbon footprint by adopting virtualization technology. As LIPA shifts from underutilized to properly utilized servers, and decreases the number of physical servers relative to the total computing load, the energy consumed per computing load, and for the environment overall, declines. Faulkner notes that LIPA not only saves on the energy cost to run servers, but also on the energy needed to manufacture servers, as it purchases fewer servers and relies on virtual machines.

Considering the energy consumption of its virtualized servers, LIPA estimates that it has reduced its carbon footprint by nearly 23 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year, and saved £2,312 (U.S.$3,712) annually. And, that sum doesn’t include any savings from the acquisition of fewer computers, or from the reduced expenditure for cooling required for a larger computing environment.

“With Hyper-V virtualization, we’re not only doing a better job for our institute, we’re doing a better job for the environment,” says Faulkner.

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 in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. 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 Gardner Systems products and services, visit the website at:
www.gardnersystems.co.uk

For more information about Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, visit the website at:
www.lipa.ac.uk