Oil Firm Grows Business While Trimming Servers by 80 Percent
"We will be able to reduce our total server holdings by 80 percent using Hyper-V."Stephen McCormack, Group IT Manager, Maxol
Maxol markets a comprehensive range of oil and petroleum products to all sectors of the Irish market. Always trying to trim costs, Maxol wanted to curb the rate of server growth and the costs associated with server proliferation. It also wanted to boost utilization of its servers, some of which ran at a limited capacity. Maxol used the Windows Server® 2008 Enterprise operating system featuring Hyper-V™ virtualization technology to consolidate 22 servers to 6 servers, an 80 percent reduction. Maxol estimates that it will save approximately U.S.$94,000 in hardware and $47,000 in electrical costs over three years. Server utilization has jumped to 30 percent, and server management is easier using Microsoft® System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. The IT staff can create virtual machines in a fraction of the time needed to deploy physical servers.
Situation
Maxol is Ireland’s oldest and foremost independent oil company and one of the largest and oldest family-owned concerns in the country. The Maxol brand is one of the most familiar and recognized in Ireland thanks to a network of 237 distinctive blue-and-yellow service stations and 45 home-heating oil distributors with blue-and-yellow vehicles. Maxol is proud that it has a service station and distributor in every county in Ireland. Dublin-based Maxol has 128 employees and annual revenues of U.S.$1.2 billion.
Maxol’s existing servers were reaching the end of their warranty, and the company wanted a new solution that would meet its increasing data storage needs while helping it reduce its data center footprint, electrical consumption, and emissions. Maxol also needed a stronger business continuity plan.
Stephen McCormack, Group IT Manager at Maxol, says, “With over 170 employees at 10 sites across Ireland, we were looking for a solution that could help us simplify our complex IT infrastructure and let us communicate between all our sites and store increasing amounts of data while taking account of limited physical capacity. We were also looking for a team that could provide us with a solution to meet our future growth and business continuity needs.”
Maxol had about 20 servers in its Dublin data center and another 10 in its Mallusk office outside Belfast. The IT staff of four spent about 60 percent of its time on routine server management tasks, leaving insufficient time to create new services demanded by business users. Each new business application vendor insisted that its software required a dedicated server. Over time, servers filled the company’s small data center, overworking the IT staff, and caused electrical bills to spiral.
However, many of the company’s 30 or so servers were not being used at full potential, including the server that hosted the Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007 e-mail messaging and collaboration software. “Our most-taxed server hosted Exchange Server 2003 and ran at about 30 percent utilization,” says Nicholas Merton, IT Support at the Maxol. “Our other servers ran at 10 percent utilization or less. Most of our computing horsepower sat idle, yet we had to keep adding servers and were in danger of maxing out our data center facility.”
Because it does not recover or refine oil, Maxol’s business model and profits are based on distribution efficiencies and cost control. “We’re always looking for efficiencies to cut costs and reduce our operational overhead while providing excellent IT services,” McCormack says.
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Solution
Maxol realized that it needed to halt server proliferation and improve server utilization by embracing virtualization. Maxol first experimented with virtualization in 2007 by implementing Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1 in a cluster configuration. On this three-node cluster, the IT staff created 12 virtual machines that ran several infrastructure applications, such as domain controllers, file and print servers, Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 data management software, and administrative functions. However, there were limits to this virtualization solution: it could not support multicore processors, threaded applications, or Exchange Server 2007. “We wanted to migrate our entire server estate to a virtual environment and needed a virtualization solution that would take us there,” Merton says.
In early 2007, Maxol evaluated the latest offerings from VMware, which looked interesting but were extremely expensive and offered features that Maxol did not need. Soon after, Maxol met with its Microsoft representative and learned about the Hyper-V™ virtualization technology that is part of Windows Server® 2008 operating system. “We wanted to move to Windows Server 2008 anyway because of its support for 64-bit applications such as SQL Server 2008,” Merton says. “We saw that Hyper-V did everything we needed and was far more cost-effective than VMware, which costs about $6,300 per server more than Hyper-V.”
Maxol also decided to use Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to manage its virtual machines. This solution provides centralized management of virtual machines under a variety of virtualization technologies, accelerates virtual machine provisioning, and improves server utilization. “When we implement virtual machines in other locations, we’ll be able to see all our server holdings from one console in Dublin,” Merton says. “Plus, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 provides load balancing features that will help us get the most performance from our virtual machines.”
Maxol partnered with Dell to participate in the Microsoft Virtualization Rapid Deployment Program (RDP). Global Infrastructure Consulting Services from Dell supported Maxol in the evaluation and deployment of Hyper-V with technical assistance that included services, training, and ongoing technical support during the RDP. Dell also created best-practice recommendations and provided knowledge transfer for the Maxol IT staff.
“There are few companies in Ireland that specialize in virtual environments besides VMware,” Merton says. “None of the other hardware providers could support us with our Hyper-V rollout; they encouraged us to go with VMware because it was what they knew. If we went with Hyper-V, it was important to work with someone who could get the job done. When I spoke with the local Dell services representative, I immediately saw that he knew what he was talking about.”
The Dell consultants used the Dell Structured Design Solution to help Maxol deploy Windows Server 2008 Enterprise, Hyper-V, and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. The Structured Design Solution is a phased methodology created to assess, design, and validate a technology for each customer. “It would have taken us years to deploy this software ourselves without Dell’s help, given our current workload, which is to say it simply would not have happened,” Merton says. “My staff is overworked already and simply has no time to take on new projects like this. With Dell’s assistance, we got it done in three weeks.”
Dell created a Hyper-V proof-of-concept by consolidating 15 physical servers onto four servers running Windows Server 2008 Enterprise and Hyper-V. Maxol used Dell PowerEdge 2950 III servers with two Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors and 16 gigabytes of RAM. The four servers are configured as an active-active cluster connected to a Dell/EMC EX-300 storage subsystem with 1 terabyte of storage across a storage area network (SAN). This host cluster runs a total of 20 guests, or virtual machines.
The virtual machines run a combination of the Windows Server 2008 Enterprise and Windows Server 2003 R2 operating systems. Maxol runs Exchange Server 2007, SQL Server 2005, Terminal Services, and file and print servers as key workloads in its virtual environment. Going forward, nearly every business application at Maxol will be a candidate for virtualization.
Maxol is also investigating the use of Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 to simplify the backup of both physical and virtual workloads. Using this program, Maxol could implement centralized disk-to-disk-to-tape protection of all major locations from a centralized console. The solution would shorten backup windows, provide a snapshot of backups throughout the day, and speed the restoration of files.
Benefits
By implementing Windows Server 2008 Enterprise, Hyper-V, and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, Maxol is in the process of trimming its server holdings by 80 percent, resulting in a reduction of its electrical bills by U.S.$47,000 over three years. It has also boosted server utilization to 30 percent, simplified server management, and increased server availability.
More Growth with Lower Costs
Using Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V, Maxol is consolidating 15 of its Dublin servers down to four servers and will soon consolidate seven or eight servers down to two at another key location. “We will be able to reduce our total physical server holdings by 80 percent using Hyper-V,” McCormack says. “The virtualized environment is the foundation stone on which the IT team will build all future business value. This environment will allow us to grow exponentially without buying so many servers or worrying about compatibility issues between different servers. We can focus on delivering real benefit to our users by taking advantage of the vast range of Microsoft programs. We can also incorporate our key ERP application into this environment in the future.”
Merton adds, “There’s a lot we still want to do with virtualization, but we’re off to a good start. We’ve clearly demonstrated its benefits. Instead of buying three new servers a year, we won’t have to buy any new servers for four more years. At $9,400 per server, that’s a savings of $94,000 savings in hardware alone.”
Lower electrical bills multiply the savings. “We estimate that we’ll save about $47,000 in electrical costs over three years,” Merton adds. “We also plan to shut down servers at night when the processing load is far less and move their applications to a smaller number of servers. In a physical environment, you can’t just turn off Exchange Server or other critical applications. But in a virtual environment, you can use System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to automatically move selected applications to specified servers and move them back to their ‘home’ servers in the morning.” More efficient electrical power usage also improves Maxol’s standing as a “green” oil company.
Server Utilization Increases to 30 Percent
By running multiple virtual machines on a single physical server, Maxol has been able to boost server utilization from less than 10 percent to at least 30 percent. “We’re getting far more from our hardware,” Merton says. “I don’t think we’ll ever rattle these Dell servers, because the Intel processors are so powerful, but some applications like Exchange Server 2007 can use all the power you can throw at them.”
Easier IT Management
Maxol has been able to use the physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration template in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to easily migrate workloads from physical to virtual servers. “This tool is very good and will be very useful in managing all our servers from a single location,” Merton says. “It took less than a day to move 12 servers to a virtual environment.”
When Maxol is ready to refresh server hardware, which it does every five years, the IT staff will be able to easily create new virtual machines and migrate workloads to the new servers. “It takes far less time to provision a virtual machine than it does a physical server—one day per physical server versus only a few minutes for each virtual machine,” says Merton. “We created five new virtual machines within an hour.”
Ongoing server management is also easier and more efficient in a virtual environment. The System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Administrator Console provides a central place to perform resource tuning, workload balancing, and overall system monitoring. “It’s easier to sort out problems in a virtual environment when they do occur,” Merton says.
Increases Server Availability
A benefit of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise is the sophisticated clustering support. Hyper-V extends this benefit by supporting highly available virtual machines. Maxol takes advantage of these capabilities to increase the reliability of its data centers. “We can keep all our virtual machines available at all times,” Merton says. “If anything happens to one server, the cluster automatically moves the affected workloads to a new server, transparent to users. With Hyper-V, we’ll essentially eliminate downtime, which is important as we move into several e-commerce ventures that require high reliability.”
Maxol also plans to install a server in an offsite location for disaster recovery purposes. If anything happens to one of its data centers, the IT staff can manually or automatically move virtual machines to the offsite location, which speeds recovery time and minimizes business interruptions. “The organization gets a double win: higher availability and very little IT work or cost to implement a solid disaster recovery solution,” McCormack concludes.
Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008
Together, Hyper-V technology, a key feature of the Windows Server 2008 operating system, and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 provide a reliable virtualization technology and comprehensive management solution that make it easier for customers to virtualize their IT infrastructure and reduce costs. With integrated administration, customers can use a single console to centralize management of a heterogeneous virtual machine infrastructure; increase physical server utilization; rapidly provision new virtual machines; and provide dynamic performance and resource optimization of hardware, operating systems, and applications. Both of these technologies easily plug into existing infrastructures, so companies can continue to use their current patching, provisioning, management, and support tools and processes. This combined virtualization technology and management solution also provides great value, because customers can make the most of their IT professionals' skill set, the breadth of solutions from Microsoft partners, and comprehensive support from Microsoft.
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Document published August 2008
 Solution OverviewCountry or Region: Ireland Customer Profile Business Situation Solution Benefits |