Customer Solution Case Study

IT Company Achieves 75 Percent Virtualization for Cost Savings and Business Agility

OverviewCountry or Region: GermanyIndustry: Professional services—IT services

Customer ProfileVoith IT Solutions provides centralized IT services that support the 40,000 employees who work for Voith, a global manufacturing company.

Business SituationAfter making positive impacts to the business with its early ventures into server virtualization, Voith wanted to continue transforming its infrastructure to support a dynamic IT environment.

SolutionVoith turned to Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V technology and grew its virtual infrastructure to 185 hosts and 1,196 virtual machines—representing 75 percent of its infrastructure.

Benefits Reduced hardware costs by 40

percent Increased virtualization Improved application performance Improved business agility

“For hardware costs alone, we estimate that our virtualized infrastructure today costs at least 40 percent less than an equivalent physical environment. And we expect that savings to grow.”

Peter Dankerl, Systems Administrator, Voith IT Solutions

Voith IT Solutions provides IT services that support the global operations of parent company, Voith, from its headquarters in Heidenheim, Germany, as well as locations throughout Asia. To maximize service while minimizing costs, the IT company turned to virtualization solutions from Microsoft in 2004 but wanted to continue making improvements. So in November 2009, Voith IT Solutions implemented Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V technology and by March 2011 had virtualized 75 percent of its server infrastructure—185 hosts and 1,196 virtual machines. The company’s virtualized infrastructure costs 40 percent less than an all-physical infrastructure, and the company expects savings to grow as it continues to virtualize more workloads. Voith IT Solutions has maintained high levels of application availability and performance, and can respond to changing business needs with greater agility.

SituationVoith IT Solutions is an independent company that provides centralized IT services to parent company, Voith, a global manufacturer operating in the paper, energy, mobility, and industrial service markets. Founded in 1867, Voith has more than 270 locations worldwide. As one of the largest family-owned enterprises in Europe, it employs 40,000 people, 4,500 of whom work in the company’s headquarters in Heidenheim, Germany.

Providing efficient, reliable, and cost-effective IT solutions and services to support Voith global operations is the main directive for the employees at Voith IT Solutions. In addition, the company shares its IT expertise outside the Voith organization, providing hosting services for several external customers, primarily smaller companies in Europe.

In 2004, Voith IT Solutions started to explore server virtualization as a way to build an optimized, dynamic IT environment that would help Voith respond to business challenges and opportunities. These early forays into virtualization were a response to a growing number of underutilized servers at Voith and a desire to provide prompt service. The IT company’s initial goals were to manage server sprawl and eliminate instances of single servers required to host single applications.

“We saw virtualization as a foundation for building more responsive IT services in many business scenarios, both for Voith and our external customers,” says Monika Stern, Systems Engineer at Voith IT

Solutions. “In addition to server consolidation and cost reduction, we wanted to deliver higher capacity and flexible hosting services for headquarters and global offices, and maximize performance for business-critical applications.”

First Steps to Server VirtualizationVoith IT Solutions started with server virtualization based on Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 as a first step toward a dynamic server infrastructure. “We have an environment built primarily on Microsoft products and technologies and, at the time, had more than 1,000 Windows-based servers around the world. To provide the best support for our environment, we decided to use a Microsoft virtualization solution,” says Peter Dankerl, Systems Administrator at Voith IT Solutions.

The IT company standardized on the Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition operating system and deployed Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2. The company immediately recognized the merits of server virtualization and consolidated multiple workloads in its virtualized environment. It supported the business operations of the parent company using less hardware, and also achieved faster response time by avoiding the long process of procuring and configuring new physical hardware, which often took up to a month.

Additional OpportunitiesDespite these successful steps toward an end-to-end virtualization solution, Voith IT Solutions felt there were additional opportunities for improvement. Several virtualized business-critical applications,

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such as the company’s output management system, were consistently consuming almost 100 percent of available CPUs. “We faced performance restrictions that meant we couldn’t answer requests from the business to host 64-bit operating systems or run resource-intensive applications that required more than one CPU,” says Dankerl. “We sometimes get two requests a week for new servers from the business, and we wanted a faster way to get them up and running. And we needed a simple way to set up clusters to achieve and maintain high availability for our virtual machines.”

Voith IT Solutions needed a virtualization solution that would amplify the benefits it had already achieved with Virtual Server 2005: improved hardware consolidation, better service to outlying offices, improved application performance, and increased business agility through efficient management of the virtualized environment. Any improvements in these areas would be reflected in improved IT services to Voith, empowering the parent company to respond quickly to business issues and market environments. These improved services could also be passed along to Voith IT Solutions’ external customers, helping generate additional revenue and grow the business.

SolutionWhen Microsoft released the Windows Server 2008 Enterprise operating system with Hyper-V virtualization technology, Voith IT Solutions saw an opportunity to improve its IT services. “Hyper-V gave us all the performance, reliability, and scalability we needed to virtualize as many workloads as possible, including resource-intensive

applications running on 64-bit guest operating systems,” says Stern.

In July 2008, Voith IT Solutions put its first virtualized server running Hyper-V into production at its main data center in Heidenheim. System engineers first moved the virtual machines that were experiencing performance issues on Virtual Server 2005. They used Hyper-V Manager, which is a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in, with Hyper-V to migrate the servers. Because Hyper-V supports up to four processors per virtual machine, the team was able to assign extra processing power to the virtual disks, which do not depend on specific hardware configurations, to boost application performance.

With the release of Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise and a new version of Hyper-V, Voith IT Solutions continued its server virtualization efforts. Whereas previously, with Windows Server 2003 and Virtual Server, the company used Microsoft Cluster Service to build redundancy, Voith IT Solutions now uses the Failover Cluster Manager MMC snap-in. The system engineering team took advantage of the snap-in and its functions for the Hyper-V role to quickly build additional redundancy into the company’s virtualized environment. The Failover Cluster Management console provides increased functionality and virtual machine controls that are consistent with the Hyper-V Manager snap-in.

Large-Scale Virtualization By March 2011, Voith IT Solutions had built a private cloud, in which cloud resources are confined inside a firewall and the

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company controls the infrastructure. This model helps the IT company deliver services across the entire Voith organization. Voith IT Solutions has 185 physical hosts supporting 1,196 virtual machines—representing a server infrastructure that is now 75 percent virtualized. The company has 40 Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V hosts with a mix of two-node to four-node clusters and 133 Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V hosts with a mix of two-node, three-node, four-node, five-node, six-node, and eight-node clusters. The company also has 12 Virtual Server 2005 servers remaining, primarily at branch offices throughout Asia. “As Virtual Server 2005 hardware runs out of warranty in our branch offices, we will replace the machines with new servers and install Hyper-V,” says Dankerl.

Each host supports a variety of business-critical applications, including Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services, Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 connectivity software, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 data management software, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 communications software, file and web servers, and the output management system.

Comprehensive Infrastructure ManagementAfter using Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 to manage earlier versions of its virtualized environment, Voith IT Solutions upgraded to System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2. Though the company relies on centralized IT management from its main data center in Heidenheim, it also gives network administrators at branch locations access to

Virtual Machine Manager. “As our virtualization environment expands, we want to give branch locations the tools that they need to manage their local environment,” explains Dankerl. “Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 enables us to retain centralized control, but also provide remote locations with the visibility into their virtual server workloads that they need and the ability to respond quickly to local business requirements.”

Voith IT Solutions enabled the Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) feature in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 and receives PRO tips in the Administrator Console. Administrators rely on the tips to make decisions about how to load-balance virtual machines between physical hosts when specific thresholds are exceeded and when to migrate virtual machines to a different physical host in the event of hardware failure.

The IT company uses Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 at its main data center. System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 is a unified backup and recovery solution that uses cloud-based repositories to safeguard data in the company’s virtualization environment. When the company completes its migration from Virtual Server to Hyper-V at branch locations, it also plans to deploy Data Protection Manager to those locations.

End-to-End Virtualization Plans for the FutureAfter witnessing the merits of server virtualization and a comprehensive management solution in its evolving private

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“Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 enables us to retain centralized control, but also provide remote locations with the visibility into their virtual server workloads that they need and the ability to respond quickly to local business requirements.”

Peter Dankerl, Systems Administrator, Voith IT Solutions

cloud, Voith IT Solutions has decided to extend its virtualization efforts to the desktop. By using Hyper-V in combination with Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Suite, the company will virtualize a portion of its client computing environment in the data center so that it can take advantage of powerful data center bandwidth to deliver a more responsive computing experience to customers.

“We are focusing our desktop virtualization efforts on users of some specific applications for now,” says Dankerl. “If an application requires significant processing power and has a dependency on the network, it is a best practice to use a virtual desktop in the data center for greater bandwidth and network speed. Another reason for our desktop virtualization project is security. With a virtual desktop, potentially confidential information is not stored locally but rather in the data center where we have more control.”

BenefitsVoith IT Solutions is using its virtualization solution to reduce infrastructure costs through consolidation and to provide better IT services to the Voith organization by virtualizing more workloads and improving system performance and application availability. All of these capabilities can then be used to grow business.

Reduced Infrastructure Costs By using Hyper-V, Voith IT Solutions saves money through hardware consolidation, both at headquarters and at branch offices. This means Voith can keep up with global growth while minimizing costs. “Before,

Voith’s business was growing much faster than we could virtualize physical servers,” says Stern. “With Hyper-V, we can control server sprawl and consolidate hardware at locations around the world.”

When Voith IT Solutions first started virtualizing servers using Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V technology in July 2008, it realized a positive economic impact to its infrastructure costs in a few short months. “In the first six months after deploying Hyper-V, we saved tens of thousands of euros in hardware and electrical costs,” says Stern. Those savings continue to increase as Voith IT Solutions virtualizes more and more servers.

“For hardware costs alone, we estimate that our virtualized infrastructure today costs at least 40 percent less than an equivalent physical environment,” says Dankerl. “We expect that savings to grow as we continue to migrate to Hyper-V and virtualize the remainder of our server infrastructure and begin virtualizing the desktop environment, too.”

By consolidating workloads and running 1,196 virtual machines on 185 physical hosts, Voith IT Solutions has reduced power consumption and realized incremental savings. “With our current environment, we consume even less power than we did before our first virtualization efforts in 2004,” says Stern. “We have reduced energy costs by more than €100,000 annually [approximately U.S.$141,000].”

Improved ResponsivenessVoith IT Solutions is receiving more and more requests for hosting servers—a

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“There is no difference in performance with SQL Server running on high-performance physical hardware versus SQL Server running on a Hyper-V host. This is tremendous, considering that today’s physical hardware is very powerful.”

Monika Stern, Systems Engineer, Voith IT Solutions

gratifying acknowledgement that the company is now able to respond to a latent business need. From its early virtualization efforts, Voith IT Solutions has since expanded its infrastructure from 9 Hyper-V hosts and 54 virtual machines to 185 hosts and 1,196 virtual machines.

“Our main task is to host servers for the business departments at Voith, and Hyper-V is the key enabling technology to build that business,” says Stern. “Now we are hosting the 64-bit version of Microsoft SQL Server 2008, and we have successfully virtualized public folder servers running Exchange Server 2007. We have increased business with an important internal customer, the Terminal Server team, running four instances of Terminal Services on a single Hyper-V host. Plus, we have virtualized all of our file servers across the organization.”

Increased Performance and AvailabilitySince the server team began running virtual machines and their workloads on Hyper-V hosts, system performance and application availability have increased dramatically. Thanks to pass-through disks for high-performance servers, 64-bit operating system support, and multicore processing, the Hyper-V virtualized environment at Voith contributes to performance that is comparable with systems running on their own hardware.

“When we migrated to Hyper-V, the performance improved dramatically, and when we assigned extra CPUs to our virtualized output management system, there was a further increase in

performance,” reports Stern. “With our output management system, end users did not know they were using virtualization.”

In addition, the team ran benchmark tests of SQL Server performance in both physical and virtual environments. “There is no difference in performance with SQL Server running on high-performance physical hardware versus SQL Server running on a Hyper-V host,” says Stern. “This is tremendous, considering that today’s physical hardware is very powerful.”

Taking advantage of Hyper-V and the failover cluster feature in Windows Server 2008, Voith IT Solutions quickly and easily created highly available virtual machines to boost the end-user experience and ensure minimal disruptions in service should a node fail. “The installation and implementation of Hyper-V and failover clustering is very straightforward,” says Stern. “The failover switch for virtual machines is faster than the two or three clicks that were required previously. And when we perform maintenance on our host servers in a clustered configuration, we can easily switch the virtual machines around to reduce downtime for the end users.”

Built Business AgilityThe cumulative effect of all these benefits means that Voith IT Solutions can deliver more responsive IT services to Voith, increasing the parent company’s business agility. Instead of handling physical machines, the server team simply works with virtual disks. “Our virtual servers are easy to copy and move, so we can allocate resources quickly and improve our backup-and-restore capabilities,” says Dankerl.

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“If a colleague needs a server, we can provide server capacity with a few mouse clicks and have it up and running in less than two hours. We have gone from weeks to days, and now down to hours.”

Peter Dankerl, Systems Administrator, Voith IT Solutions

“Now our branch offices can quickly respond to local market conditions. If a colleague in China needs a server, we can provide server capacity with a few mouse clicks from headquarters. The office doesn’t need to buy a new physical server or install additional switch ports.”

Adding new servers has increasingly become a simpler task that takes incrementally less time. When the company first started virtualizing its infrastructure, the server team eliminated the need to procure and configure physical servers, shaving weeks off the time required to respond to new server requests. Now, with the improvements in Windows Server 2008 R2, the server team can provide new virtual servers in hours. “By using the Cluster Shared Volumes feature with Hyper-V, we have enough disk space allocated and do not need to request new disks each time we need to add a virtual machine. If a colleague needs a server, we can provide server capacity with a few mouse clicks and have it up and running in less than two hours. We have gone from weeks to days, and now down to hours,” says Dankerl.

By using System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 to manage its growing virtualized environment, Voith IT Solutions continues to drive efficient, effective IT services. For example, Stern and Dankerl used Virtual Machine Manager to help fulfill a request from the Terminal Server team to virtualize two terminal servers that hosted complex applications. “The Terminal Server team didn’t want to configure new physical servers, so we used Virtual Machine Manager to migrate workloads to a virtual server on Hyper-V,” explains Stern.

“This process could have consumed a lot of time and labor resources for the Terminal Server team, yet it took us only two hours to provide this value-added service to the business.”

Even with the dramatic improvements that Voith IT Solutions has made with its virtualized environment, the company plans to continue its efforts. “We are looking forward to combining the management capabilities of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 with Hyper-V to easily handle anticipated growth in our virtualized environment,” says Dankerl. “Capabilities such as resource planning, easier virtual machine deployment, templates, and integration with System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 will all contribute to more efficient, cost-effective IT services. We can use Hyper-V to better fulfill our mandate to save money and help Voith become a more responsive company.”

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For More InformationFor 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 Voith IT Solutions products and services visit the website at: www.voith-it-solutions.com

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published July 2011

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio− Windows Server 2008 R2

Microsoft System Center− Microsoft System Center Data

Protection Manager 2007− Microsoft System Center Operations

Manager 2007 R2

− Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2

Technologies− Hyper-V

Hardware HP ProLiant BL460 G1 and G6 Server

Blade HP DL380 G5 and G6 Servers