Educators Aim to Improve Education, Trim Servers by 60 Percent using Virtualization

Educators Aim to Improve Education, Trim Servers by 60 Percent using Virtualization

Overview Country or Region: United States

Industry: Education—K-12 Customer Profile The Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) supports Kentucky’s 174 public school districts, serving 600,000 students and 100,000 teachers and administrators. Business Situation KDE had to provide new technology services in the face of severe budget cuts. It wanted to use virtualization to reduce its server burden and guide school districts in solving similar problems. Solution KDE is using the Windows Server® 2008 operating system with Hyper-V™ technology to consolidate physical servers and Microsoft® System Center solutions to streamline server management.

Benefits
ï® Reduced data center costs
ï® Better accommodation of new services
ï® Improved education
ï® Improved disaster recovery
ï® Greener operation

Our mission is to enable all the children in the state to have the same opportunities, and Hyper-V is going to help us reach that goal.‖ Jodi Hurley, Infrastructure Operations Manager, Kentucky Department of Education
The Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) wanted to streamline data center and administration costs so it could direct more resources to new educational services. It also wanted to improve server redundancy for higher availability of teaching applications. As a cost-effective way to achieve these goals, KDE has embraced server virtualization using the Windows Server® 2008 operating system with Hyper-V™ technology. Using Hyper-V, KDE plans to reduce its centralized physical server holdings by 60 percent by 2010. Fewer servers will reduce the server management workload. To attain further efficiencies, the IT staff is considering using Microsoft® System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. More importantly, by using virtualization, IT resources will be freed up and available for new services that support better teaching, and will improve server uptime to reduce classroom interruptions.
Situation

The Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) provides resources and guidance to Kentucky’s public schools and districts as they implement the state’s K-12 education requirements. The department supports 174 school districts and 700,000 users, including 600,000 students and 100,000 teachers and administrators. In 2007-2008, Kentucky implemented state budget cuts of about nine percent, which further gouged the already-static budget of the state’s Office of Education Technology. This office manages 200 servers in the department’s Frankfort, Kentucky, data center, and another 700 directory and messaging servers in school districts across the state. In addition to housing these centrally-managed servers, each of the 174 school districts maintains its own servers to run local administrative and educational applications. ―We’ve endured a static budget for a number of years, so we are always looking for ways to economize in our data center,‖ says Jodi Hurley, Infrastructure Operations Manager for the Kentucky Department of Education. ―With the latest cuts, every server expense has come under greater scrutiny, making it more difficult to obtain hardware.‖ Even if hardware had been easily obtained, the IT staff faced space and power constraints, which limited server expansion. The servers also were severely underutilized, running at well under 10 percent of capacity due to the lack of coordination between groups requisitioning servers. Across the state, school district servers were also underutilized, some running loads as small as a single cafeteria management application on a dedicated server.

The IT staff spent an inordinate amount of time provisioning and maintaining these underworked servers. ―When we did bring in a new server, it required a long, tedious process to get it out on the floor,‖ says Drew Aldridge, Systems Engineer for the Kentucky Department of Education. ―We allotted two days per server build and had six full-time employees dedicated to server deployment.‖ Rebuilding servers also took a tremendous amount of time; over the course of a typical school year, the IT staff rebuilt 10 percent to 20 percent of its Frankfort and district servers.

With only 20 people managing 900 servers in Frankfort and across the state, KDE knew it had to make these people more productive and reduce their workload if it was to remain focused on its primary mandate of supporting excellent, uninterrupted classroom education. ―Because we were at the limits of our staff and our data center, it became very difficult for us to provide new services, Herbener says. ―Without reducing our server count, heat load, and server management administration, we will not be able to undertake new education-support projects that educators need. With the goal of undertaking new projects in mind, the IT staff wanted to improve server reliability and application uptime. ―When a server failure takes out a teaching application, it results in permanent lost classroom time for the school district, Hurley says. ―For example, teachers routinely use a service called EncycloMedia (from Discovery Education). If they plan a classroom activity around that service and it’s suddenly unavailable, they have to come up with a new way to teach the subject or change their plans midstream.

KDE had experimented with virtualization to reduce server proliferation, using both Microsoft® Virtual Server 2005 and VMware in its development and test area. However, KDE wanted to further consolidate Web application servers, servers running Microsoft, without reducing our server count, heat load, and server management administration, we will not be able to undertake new education-support projects that educators need.‖ Martin Herbener, Data Architect, Kentucky Department of Education

SQL Server® 2005 data management software, application servers, and possibly some domain controllers.

KDE also wanted to master virtualization so that it could guide Kentucky’s 174 school districts in implementing the technology. ―Our districts range from small rural districts with one server to large urban districts with dozens of servers, Hurley says. ―They all face the same problems we do in terms of data center cooling, space constraints, underutilized servers, and reliability issues. We wanted to establish a virtualization standard for our districts in order to help them reduce costs and be more effective at rolling out and supporting education applications.

Solution:
In late 2007, KDE management decided to make a bigger investment in virtualization, just as Microsoft was recruiting participants for the Microsoft Virtualization Rapid Deployment Program (RDP). This program enabled organizations to evaluate an early-release version of the Windows Server® 2008 operating system with Hyper-V™ virtualization technology. ―We rely heavily on Microsoft software, and the Virtualization RDP was a good chance to learn more about virtualization in general and Hyper-V in particular, Herbener says.

KDE had standardized on the Active Directory® service for its domain service and Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 for its messaging system. KiZAN Technologies, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner based in Louisville, Kentucky, worked with KDE to deploy Windows Server 2008 Datacenter with Hyper-V on a Dell PowerEdge 1950 server with a Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor. KiZAN helped KDE consolidate eight physical servers onto this server and provided knowledge transfer to the KDE staff. ―We’ve worked with KiZAN before in implementing many other Microsoft programs, Herbener says. ―They have a great deal of experience in virtualization and were able to provide terrific guidance for our staff. KDE is running management, database, and Web workloads on its current Hyper-V–based virtual machines. Going forward, all applications will be candidates for virtualization. Within two years, KDE intends to convert an additional 100 physical servers to virtual machines running under Hyper-V. ―The only thing holding us back is our severe budget cuts, Hurley says. KDE used Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 to simplify physical-to-virtual server migration during the RDP. System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 is a management application that facilitates the creation, tuning, and management of both physical servers and virtual machines. To simplify the monitoring and backup of virtual machines, KDE plans to integrate Microsoft Operations Manager 2005, a centralized server monitoring solution, and Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007, a disk-and-tape–based backup solution. KDE is also considering adoption of Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 for enhanced management of its Hyper-V-enabled virtual machines.

Benefits:
Using Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V, KDE is looking forward to achieving significant server consolidation savings and server management efficiencies. More importantly, it expects to use virtualization to free up the IT resources needed to support new educational services. By improving server uptime and performance, KDE will be able to provide better teaching and learning experiences.
―The bigger savings potential is for districts to virtualize their local educational and administrative applications. Larger districts with a couple dozen servers could achieve a 5-to-1 server reduction ratio.‖ Jodi Hurley, Infrastructure Operations Manager, Kentucky Department of Education
Reduced Data Center Costs By 2010, KDE estimates that it will be able to achieve the following cost reductions through virtualization:
ï® Reduce its physical server holdings by 60 percent (approximately 120 servers)
ï® Reduce data center space by 50 percent
ï® Reduce server provisioning time by 50 percent
ï® Reduce power usage by 25 percent
Using efficiencies provided by Hyper-V, KDE can reduce server provisioning from two days to a few minutes. ―We have streamlined server provisioning to just a few mouse-clicks,‖ Herbener says. ―We’re interested in pursuing self-service server provisioning, too. Our developers could bring up a virtual machine for a few months and then shut it down when they’re finished. This would relieve our IT staff of dealing with these short-term provisioning requests and enable them to focus on higher-value activities.

As KDE implements virtualization in district offices, the savings will multiply. It could use Hyper-V to consolidate the two Active Directory servers and one Exchange Server 2003–based server in each district to just one physical server. ―This one move would reduce district server holdings by two-thirds, Hurley says. However, the bigger savings potential is for districts to virtualize their local educational and administrative applications. Larger districts with a couple dozen servers could achieve a 5-to-1 server reduction ratio.

Better Ability to Accommodate New Services
By reducing its server count and workload, KDE is better able to roll out new services in support of better teaching and learning. For example, the state is gradually moving to online testing, which requires that new online testing applications be installed in each district. ―For contractual reasons, we have to use multiple vendors to provide these applications, Hurley says. ―Instead of adding multiple servers in each district to support testing software from multiple vendors, we’ll be able to use Hyper-V to install just one server per district and support all testing applications on individual virtual machines. Frankly, I don’t know how we’d support new education services going forward without virtualization. Improved Education

aIn addition to freeing up staff and server resources in support of new applications, KDE plans to use virtualization to reduce downtime and improve application performance, both of which impact the quality of education in Kentucky schools. ―My dream is for all Kentucky schools to have server redundancy so that we can eliminate application downtime and learning interruptions, Hurley says. ―Many of our schools are in regions that are susceptible to storms and have older wiring infrastructure that is easily affected by bad weather. Some of these districts don’t even have air conditioning in their server rooms, which increases downtime.

KDE can use Windows Server 2008 failover clustering to create low-cost virtual-machine redundancy. If a physical server fails, the virtual machines on that server are automatically moved to another server so they continue to run without interruption.
With virtualization, KDE can also improve application performance, which is important in delivering a good educational experience, especially with graphics and media-intensive learning applications. ―We recently rolled out high-performance Internet bandwidth across the state, but that doesn’t help if the server at the other end is old or unreliable, Herbener says. ―Using Hyper-V, districts can achieve better server utilization, attain higher application performance and responsiveness, and deliver higher server uptime.

Frankly, I don’t know how we’d support new education services going forward without virtualization. Jodi Hurley, Infrastructure Operations Manager, Kentucky Department of Education
―We are thrilled that the Virtualization RDP has been such a success, Hurley adds. ―I cannot emphasize how much this technology effort will assist the kids in Kentucky public schools. Our mission is to enable all the children in the state to have the same opportunities, and Hyper-V is going to help us reach that goal. Server virtualization is one of the biggest wins for Kentucky schools in this next decade.

Improved Disaster Preparedness
KDE had already achieved a degree of disaster preparedness by installing two Active Directory domain controllers in each district office, with one backing up the other. However, its ultimate goal is to use Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V to implement failover clustering and have districts across the state pair up and serve as failover sites for one another. ―If one district’s computers were endangered, they could fail over to a partner district’s data center in a distant part of the state Herbener says. ―Or, we could use Hyper-V support for stretch clustering to maintain one district’s cluster in two different locations. This would dramatically improve our disaster preparedness.

Greener Operation
KDE sees that virtualization has ―green benefits, as well. The fewer servers that KDE has to power, the lower its energy bills and the better it can fulfill the state’s environmental goals. ―By using fewer physical servers, we reduce our environmental impact and lower our energy costs, Hurley says. ―We’re using less electricity and dumping fewer discarded servers into landfills. Virtualization helps us be better environmental citizens, Hurley says.
―We could use Hyper-V support for stretch clustering to maintain one district’s cluster in two different locations. This would dramatically improve our disaster preparedness. Martin Herbener, Data Architect, Kentucky Department of Education
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.