Microsoft Gains Ground in Virtualisation Arena

Microsoft has released a full set of virtualisation solutions covering the desktop through to the datacentre. The centre of gravity has shifted, and IT managers across Europe are taking notice.

LONDON, 8 September 2008 — Poised to be the single biggest disruptor in the business datacentre over the next few years, virtualisation is back in the headlines as Microsoft rounds out its suite of virtualisation offerings with new products, management tools, licensing changes and alliances.

According to Zane Adam, Senior Director of virtualisation strategy, Microsoft Server and Tools Division, "Virtualisation profoundly affects nearly every aspect of IT infrastructure management, from accelerating application deployments; to ensuring systems, applications and data are always available. For customers to realize true benefits of virtualization and get rapid return on their investment they should have a holistic strategy for both the virtualization platform and management of the physical and virtual environment through a single pane of glass."

With an enterprise-ready solution set that spans the datacentre to the desktop, Microsoft offers companies high value stemming from the familiar Windows platform, a large hardware and software partner network that supports the technology, and initiatives related to solution accelerators, licensing and interoperability.

In other words, Microsoft has brought a robust and cost-effective alternative to the table as European organisations strive to deliver computing resources to people as efficiently as possible. Companies such as Raiffeisenbank Austria (RBA), PGGM and Brain Force are evidence that these solutions are having an impact in the back office.

Enterprise Technology You Can Bank On
Thirteen years ago, Raiffeisen Zentralbank Österreich, one of Austria's leading banks, decided to invest in Croatia by founding Raiffeisenbank Austria. Today, RBA has 57 branches and outlets in 32 towns across Croatia.

Challenged by this rapid expansion, RBA began looking for ways to streamline costs and improve operational efficiencies across all departments, including IT, which employs 120 people. The IT department began by addressing inefficiencies in its overcrowded datacentre in Zagreb, where electricity and air conditioning expenses have been increasing at double-digit rates.

The bank found that it was underutilizing its 200 servers, many of which hosted just a single application and were not designed to work within a server cluster. Their average server utilization rate was a paltry 15 percent.

Problems with server management created additional challenges. The process of acquiring, installing, and provisioning a server was laborious. Staffers were also saddled with inefficient recovery processes when servers failed.

"RBA is growing rapidly, and we don't want our datacentre to be a bottleneck in that growth," Marko Pranic, Deputy Executive Director of the IT and Direct Banking Division at Raiffeisenbank Austria, said last year.

After evaluating virtualisation technologies from both Microsoft and VMware, the bank chose to implement a Microsoft solution. "We were familiar with Microsoft technology and trusted it," says Pranic. "Microsoft Croatia has always provided us with excellent support, and their implementation costs were very attractive."

In August 2007, Pranic and his team installed two new IBM servers running Windows Server 2003. Using Microsoft Virtual Server and the clustering feature in Windows Server to create a virtualized failover cluster environment, IT staffers then deployed the previously isolated applications as 12 virtual machines (VMs) in a host clustering environment.

"We integrated VMs on both physical servers so we could use automated failover to secure resources in case one of the servers failed," explains Pranic. In this scenario, if one of the physical hosts fails or requires scheduled downtime for maintenance, the second server can replace it.

But they didn't stop there. Pranic and his team worked with Microsoft Croatia to deploy Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). SCVMM provides centralized management of the bank's new virtualized environment and provides a console for virtual machine management. From that console, an administrator can check the status of a VM, see what applications are running inside it, and move it from one physical machine to another.

"Today, we have several mission-critical services on our VMs, including a domain name system, a remote authentication dial-in user service for controlling access to network resources and antivirus tools," says Pranic. "It took only a month to complete the project, and we encountered no serious problems along the way."

RBA is already seeing a return on its investment and believes its first experience with hardware virtualisation bodes well for future reductions in total cost of ownership. "This first project was a relatively small one, but it was a huge change for our datacentre, and it has cleared the way for further virtualisation projects," says Pranic. "With a Microsoft virtualisation solution, we have saved money, improved server management, and boosted the reliability of our infrastructure. We now have a better platform on which to grow our business."

The Next Wave: Presentation Virtualisation
Server virtualisation is a fairly well-entrenched technology at this point, with desktop virtualisation following close behind. Less well deployed – and understood – is the newer concept of presentation virtualisation. Terminal Services, one of the core virtualisation technologies available in Windows Server 2008, makes it possible to run an application in one location but have it be controlled in another, which is the essence of presentation virtualisation.

With presentation virtualisation, you can install and manage applications on centralized servers, which send screen images to users; users' client machines, in turn, send keystrokes and mouse movements back to the server. Although all application processing takes place on the central server, from a user perspective these applications look, feel and behave as if they were running on his or her local machine.

Dutch income protector PGGM is one of several companies that are starting to embrace presentation virtualisation. The company administers about €90 billion in funds for two million current and retired healthcare and social services workers.

The majority of PGGM's 1,000 employees work primarily from a corporate office. But employees who manage the company's external assets spend most of their time at remote locations across the Netherlands and abroad, and some employees work from their homes.

For years, these mobile employees had used a virtual private network (VPN) to connect to IT resources from remote locations. However, the VPN introduced several security risks. PCs infected with a virus could easily infect the network, and sensitive data could be compromised if downloaded onto a workstation that didn't have the latest firewall and virus protection updates.

The VPN presented other challenges as well. Installing it on the employee's workstation took time, and if an employee happened to be at a remote location but did not have access to his or her system with the VPN client, the network could not be accessed.

So in 2007, PGGM replaced its VPN with a web-based solution supported by Terminal Services in the Windows Server 2008 operating system. The solution allows workstations to connect to data and applications that remain behind the corporate firewall. As a result of its solution, PGGM has boosted network security and employee productivity, simplified system management, and made it easier for people to access the resources they need.

"We no longer have unmanaged clients accessing our network," said Immanuël Noorman, Information Communication Technology Architect, PGGM. "We haven't encountered any great challenges deploying our Terminal Services pilot environment, and our people can do their work from anyplace as long as they have a computer with an Internet connection."

Before adopting presentation virtualisation, employees had to download and upload documents over the VPN. Today, because remote employees use the applications and data that reside inside of the PGGM network, they don't have to wait for file transfers. In addition, remote employees do not have to keep track of multiple versions of files. And if employees want to use a different computer to access the PGGM network, they can do so without installing an additional VPN client. As a result, employees can get the information they need, when and where they need it.

Presentation virtualisation eliminates or minimizes many tasks that system administrators used to perform. They no longer have to help employees install VPN clients or maintain client licenses for software that runs on remote systems.

"We expect to be able to streamline the management of our overall solution," says Noorman. "For example, we really like the new Server Manager. It provides a single place where we can go to get a good overview of the system and what we can do with it. This makes it much easier for system administrators to do their jobs."

The enhanced system management, security and remote access capabilities will eventually translate into monetary savings. "We expect to lower the total cost of ownership as a result of deploying Windows Server 2008 virtualisation," concludes Noorman.

Greater Flexibility, Lower Cost
RBA and PGGM are by no means isolated cases. And organisations that aren't already using Microsoft virtualisation technology are taking notice.

Brain Force, also based in the Netherlands, specialises in the design, implementation and maintenance of IT infrastructures. Its customers are medium-size and large enterprises, as well as systems integrator partners that engage them on large projects. As part of its product and service offering, Brain Force implements server virtualisation and desktop virtualisation for its enterprise customers based on Microsoft technology.

Although virtualisation technology is embedded in much of what Brain Force does, it is not a major point of discussion with customers, according to Albert Hooyer, product manager at Brain Force. Virtualisation is simply part of a well-designed IT environment.

"We're not selling virtualisation, per se," Hooyer says. "We're selling an environment that increases flexibilty and reduces cost. With these technologies, customers can deploy applications more quickly, support the end user better, do more with the same number of IT personnel, and so on. We talk to our customers first about their business need — dynamic IT and the optimised desktop — and then consider the technologies we will use to deliver value."

Brain Force has been using Microsoft Virtual Server since 2005, and they already have migrated to Hyper-V, Microsoft's newly released virtualisation solution for Windows Server 2008. Some companies that engage Brain Force to manage their enterprise are already 100 percent on Hyper-V today.

"Hyper-V is very easy and it is integrated into the platform. So companies are getting interested — it is a real and very good alternative to Vmware, and because of the different pricing structure, they are very interested in what they can do with it. We've begun to see the first customers choosing Hyper-V as their primary choice."

The value companies get from virtualisation is twofold. On the server side, it boils down to increased flexibility in managing and hardware consolidation, reducing the number of physical servers a company requires to run its back office. On the workstation side, application virtualisation makes it faster for IT managers to deploy software, eliminating integration testing because each application lives in its own virtual environment.

The key benefits of the Microsoft solutions that resonate with Brain Force customers, Hooyer says, is the price, plus integration in the management layer, which gives IT managers control over both the physical and virtual environments from one toolset.

"As a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner, it is a good opportunity for us to do more in this market. We are also a VMware partner, of course. But we see demand trending towards Microsoft. Microsoft has a very good proposition and product set, especially with the new products coming right now. Our customers are happy to have a viable alternative to VMware, and while Brain Force supports both, we are very satisfied with the technology Microsoft is offering."