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Microsoft Launching Hyper-V, App-V and SCVMM to the World (Part 2 - Hyper-V Case Studies)

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Want to see how companies can reap tangible benefits of Hyper-V virtualization?  Check out how these 2 latest case studies from Atlantic Journal-Constitution and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and see how you can benefit from a more agile and cost-effective datacenter today!

Atlantic Journal-Constitution

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.

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 to 5-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.”

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Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center

Based in New Hampshire, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC) began using server virtualization three years ago to curb server proliferation and rising electrical costs. The hospital and teaching facility initially used Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 to trim 75 servers but wanted to move even more applications to virtual machines. DHMC decided to move its virtualization infrastructure to the Windows Server 2008 operating system with Hyper-V technology, using Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to manage its server landscape. DHMC expects to reduce total server holdings by 75 percent and save U.S.$4,300 per server in hardware, maintenance, electrical, and real-estate costs. It can now virtualize its most demanding applications and expects to improve service levels, save 30 hours each month in server management, and create a more dynamic IT environment.

DHMC used the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit to assist with physical-to-virtual (P2V) server migration. “It was great to be able to use the MAP Toolkit to quickly grab a chunk of performance data from systems we were thinking of migrating,” McShinsky says. “It saved us a full week of manual work that we otherwise would have spent to set up the performance monitoring of server workloads.” 

Cheers,

Baldwin Ng (Sr. Product Manager, Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit)