Openness Customer Spotlight: University Reduces Costs with Streamlined Cross-Platform Management

Posted by Openness Team

The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) is dedicated to the advancement of knowledge through research and discovery, teaching and learning, community engagement, and public service. This public research university strives for academic excellence in all areas and uses technology to support its scholastic efforts.

Until recently, the IT department at UTSA depended on 30 VMware servers to support its 550 virtual machines, which ran Linux and Windows operating systems and handled more than 100 different applications and services—from websites to line-of-business applications.

Because it used so many different technologies, the UTSA IT staff had to be well-versed in several operating system environments and had to use multiple tools for comprehensive management and monitoring.

The University of Texas at San Antonio decided to evaluate Windows Server 2012 R2 and Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 to determine whether it could streamline management of its cross-platform environment while improving services for its faculty, staff, and student users.

After a successful pilot, UTSA is migrating its virtualization servers from VMware to the Windows Server 2012 R2 operating system with Hyper-V and is adopting Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 components.

The university expects to reduce costs and improve management of its Linux and Windows virtual machines with the new solution. “By migrating to Windows Server 2012 R2 with Hyper-V, we will be using products that play nicely with each other, which will make everything easier on us as an IT staff,” says Steven Stewart, Enterprise System Engineer at UTSA.

For more on how the university is saving money and improving interoperability with their new solution, please see the full case study.