With Virtualization, Newspaper Reduces Costs, Gains Infrastructure Flexibility

With Virtualization, Newspaper Reduces Costs, Gains Infrastructure Flexibility

Overview Country or Region: United States Industry: Newspaper Customer Profile The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is the leading source of news, information, and advertising for metropolitan Atlanta, reaching a print and online audience of more than 2.2 million people each week. Business Situation The newspaper’s IT staff faced critical power and cost problems due to server proliferation. The staff also needed a better disaster preparedness solution and a more flexible infrastructure. Solution The AJC worked with Microsoft and Dell consultants to implement the Windows Server® 2008 Enterprise operating system with Hyper-V™ technology and Microsoft® System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

“With Hyper-V and Windows virtual machines, we can run virtualized Linux. And we can use off-the-shelf or repurposed hardware. This gives us significant flexibility and cost savings.” Brent Register, Client/Server Engineering Manager, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

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The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC), the largest newspaper in the Southeast, was adding servers to its data center at the rate of over 10 percent a year. The data center was experiencing power and cooling capacity problems at a time of shrinking budgets. To lower costs, the AJC implemented the Windows Server® 2008 Enterprise Operating System with Hyper-V™ technology. The newspaper has dramatically consolidated its servers and reduced costs. In addition, its disaster readiness, change management, and testing capabilities are much improved. Servers are better utilized, and the IT infrastructure can better accommodate changes. IT employees expect to save a great deal of time on provisioning and maintaining servers. The AJC also uses Microsoft® System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to manage its virtualization landscape.

Situation
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) is the major daily newspaper in Atlanta, Georgia. A Cox Newspaper publication, the AJC reaches a print and online audience of more than 2.2 million people each week. The newspaper business has experienced challenges in recent years by declining advertising revenues, rising newsprint and fuel costs, and reduced budgets, making it critical for every department to control costs. For the IT staff of the AJC, this translates into pressure to halt the proliferation of servers in its data center, which accrued significant space, power, and cooling costs.

“Our data center and IT infrastructures seemed to be growing rapidly every year,” says Joel Kilthau, Senior Systems Administrator for the AJC. In the last year alone, the data center expanded by over 30 servers, for a total of 360—with about two thirds of those Windows®-based, and the rest a mix of Solaris, Red Hat, and CentOS Linux, and Mac OS X. The AJC experienced problems cooling and controlling power for so many servers. “Our data center is divided into power distribution units, and each of those has a limit to its capacity,” says Brent Register, Client/Server Engineering Manager for the AJC. “We were reaching a point where we were going to have to start adding power distribution units and increasing the cooling. We needed to get control of that.” The high temperatures generated by numerous physical servers in the data center resulted in the IT staff needing to repeatedly interrupt their regular duties in order to check on the data center’s environmental conditions. “Approximately 100 hours a year were being spent by IT staff and maintenance crews to manually check the data center air conditioning units and rack temperatures,” says Dan McCarthy, Senior Operations Consultant at Microsoft® Consulting Services.

Like IT departments everywhere, the AJC hosted many applications on dedicated servers and used a cluster of servers to provide high availability. “Because many applications run best in independent instances of the operating system, the number of physical servers in the AJC environment was much greater than what was actually needed from a compute capacity standpoint,” says McCarthy. This resulted in costly hardware expenditures. ”The typical cost for a stand-alone server that we buy for an application is between $10,000 and $12,000,” says Register. “If I have to build a high-availability solution, that requires two servers to be clustered, and then you’ve got to add shared storage into that mix. That can run another $20,000 to $25,000.” IT staff also needed to decrease the provisioning time for servers. It currently takes three weeks to three months to provision and set up new systems. “Their current process requires time and involvement from multiple teams and individuals to procure hardware, set up power, run the network, install the operating system, and apply security patches and virus definition updates,” says McCarthy. The AJC analyzed its current infrastructure using the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP), which made it clear that the newspaper underutilized many machines. “We looked at 12 percent of our Windows servers, and we were finding anywhere between a 2 to5-percent average CPU utilization,” said Kilthau. “We had a lot of wasted CPU cycles, especially on multicore devices, and a lot of memory that just was not being used. We obviously could make much more efficient use of the physical pieces of hardware.”

“I was able to orient our Windows support team to the system in a matter of hours.” Brent Register, Client/Server Engineering Manager, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
If my central console can manage both my Microsoft virtual machines and my VMware virtual machines with an interface that is familiar and easy for my Microsoft certified staff, that’s a big plus.” Brent Register, Client/Server Engineering Manager, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Minimal disaster-recovery capabilities existed at the newspaper, due to the cost and complexity of implementing high-availability failover capabilities, which traditionally require clusters of servers. The AJC was also limited in its capacity to test changes before introducing them into the production system, due to the lack of rack space for dedicated testing facilities. Solution The AJC recognized that it could use virtualization technology to turn around its server proliferation problem, help control costs, increase utilization, and shorten provisioning time. The IT team had already deployed a combination of VMware ESX Virtual Infrastructure 3 running on IBM Blade Centers and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 in the server environment with moderate success, but the team was looking to lower costs further. The newspaper’s technical account team from Microsoft suggested and sponsored the AJC for the Microsoft Virtualization Rapid Deployment Program. A key goal for the AJC in participating in this program was to find a lower cost alternative to VMWare ESX. The AJC implemented the Windows Server® 2008 Enterprise operating system featuring Hyper-V™, the hypervisor-based virtualization technology. The AJC team received deployment assistance from Microsoft Consulting Services Communication Sector team, and engaged Dell for hardware support. Consultants from both Microsoft and Dell attended the initial deployment meetings.

“The relationship between those two has been key, not just in this project but pretty much in our infrastructure over the years,” says Register. “When there’s a problem and the lines become a little gray as to whose problem it really is, both of those business partners seem to come together quickly to find a solution. That’s very important.” Implementation of the solution began in February 2008 and, with the assistance of the Microsoft Consulting Services, is expected to be completed by September. The AJC currently uses Hyper-V on three host servers, two of which are in a Microsoft failover cluster with five Windows and one Linux virtual machines.

The third server is a stand-alone host with two instances of the Linux operating system running on it. The AJC deployed Hyper-V on a Dell PowerEdge M1000e Modular Blade Enclosure and two Dell PowerEdge M600 Blade Servers with Intel processors. The AJC is considering using Hyper-V for high-availability applications while continuing to use VMware to supplement the Hyper-V deployment. To manage the Hyper-V environment, the AJC also deployed Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, a comprehensive solution that centralizes management of virtual machines, accelerates provisioning, and improves server utilization. “It gives us a cohesive way to manage the whole Hyper-V environment,” says Kilthau. “VMware has its own virtual infrastructure tool, of course, but it can be difficult to use.”

Part of the reason the IT team chose Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V is because the AJC staff was already familiar with Microsoft technology. “From my standpoint, if my central console can manage both my Microsoft virtual machines and my VMware virtual machines with an interface that is familiar and easy for my Microsoft certified staff, that’s a big plus,” says Register.

The AJC uses System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to not only manage the three machines already deployed, but to manage physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-virtual migrations. “Because of our evolution, we’ve had the luxury of being able to create a virtual server without migrating off anything or virtualizing from a physical box,” says Register. “Now I very much have a need to consolidate from physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-virtual. System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 will allow me to do that with a great deal of ease, especially since the majority of our current server infrastructure uses Windows.” Going forward, the AJC also expects to implement virtualization at a secondary data center located at their remote printing facility. Benefits With its move to Windows Server 2008 Enterprise, Hyper-V technology, and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, the AJC has been able to control server proliferation in its data center and, most critically, reduce its equipment, space, power, and cooling costs. Server utilization has improved. The IT staff is now in a better position to implement disaster-recovery solutions and to manage infrastructure changes more flexibly. Staff expect to save time on provisioning servers, performing maintenance, and training new employees.

Reduced Costs
Based on pre-planning data collected using the MAP Toolkit, the AJC expects to consolidate with a ratio of 10 to 20 physical servers to one blade server. The AJC team is excited that Hyper-V will help them reduce or eliminate the need to continually purchase expensive hardware for applications that require independent instances of the operating system, as well as associated power and cooling costs.
The newspaper no longer spends $10,000 or more for a stand-alone server. “I can take a virtual machine and basically add it to a blade server that is already licensed for Hyper-V, add the cost of the operating system, and have a fault tolerant server, storage and infrastructure for $4,000 to $5,000,” adds Register. “And I can do it in a fraction of the time.” “With Hyper-V and Windows virtual machines, we can run virtualized Linux,” Register says. “And we can use off-the-shelf or repurposed hardware. This gives us significant flexibility and cost savings.” While VMware has a narrowly supported set of hardware, the AJC can use Hyper-V as a host with any hardware that is on the Windows Hardware Compatibility List. This list provides information about products compatible with Windows-based operating systems. “That means I can continue to buy commodity-based hardware from Dell and reap the benefits of our relationship with them,” says Register. “I don’t have to change to another vendor or buy much more expensive hardware to support Hyper-V.”

Improved Server Utilization
Instead of CPU utilization rates of as low as 2 percent, the AJC now expects to see much more efficient use of the physical machines, based on analyses by both the MAP Toolkit and PowerRecon by PlateSpin. “When the hosts are fully loaded with virtual machines, we expect to ramp up the CPU to a steady rate of 75 to80-percent utilization, leaving 20 percent for spikes and periodic processes,” Kilthau says.

Better Disaster Preparedness
The AJC is positioned to implement a robust disaster-recovery solution using Hyper-V. In the event of hardware failure, the virtual machines that run on the host server can be
automatically migrated to the next available Hyper-V host. The team can use recycled hardware from earlier Hyper-V migrations as recovery site hardware, as long as it meets the minimum requirements. “It gives us an opportunity to reuse some of the hardware that we may take offline into a virtualized cluster, so we can extend the life of that hardware more effectively,” Register says. Infrastructure Flexibility Hyper-V gives the AJC the infrastructure flexibility it needs to respond to changes. What’s more, Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 will enable the AJC to easily test all changes on copies of the various production systems before implementing the changes in production. “The testing environment will give the staff a chance to perform, document, and understand the impact of the change in the test environment, thus decreasing their overall risk,” McCarthy says. Less Time Provisioning and Maintaining Servers

With Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, the AJC staff expects to spend much less time provisioning servers. “With our virtual infrastructure in place, one of the junior administrators can press go and we have a virtual machine 30 minutes later,” says Register.
By moving most of the physical servers to a virtualized platform that runs on a larger blade infrastructure, the IT team not only expects to greatly reduce temperatures, but also to reduce or eliminate the need for manual temperature checks.

In addition, training time for managing Hyper-V is minimal. “When we brought VMware in here, we had to dedicate quite a bit of money and quite a few bodies to understanding and learning the technology,” says Kilthau. “This time, we found that building the Windows infrastructure and incorporating Hyper-V didn’t require a significant expansion of our skill set. I was able to orient our Windows support team to the system in a matter of hours.”

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. For more information, go to.