Virtualization Case Study of Jefferson County Schools

Hello Virt Planet!

When I meet with customers and partners about Microsoft Virtualization, I often get asked about similar companies or case studies.  We have a great resource of case studies on Microsoft Virtualization but I am going to start highlighting some of the new ones, as they come out.

The first one I wanted to highlight is for Jefferson County Public Schools in Kentucky.  The Jefferson County Public Schools wanted to contain server sprawl and centralize an IT infrastructure that was spread across 155 schools. And like many organizations, they needed to cut costs.

They did look at VMware, but decided to go with Microsoft. Jefferson Country’s implementation used Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V (and moving to Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V) and System Center products like Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and Operations Manager 2007.

I’ve cited a couple of quotes from the customer that stood out for me and that I think will resonate with many of you:

“The money required for licensing a VMware solution, more than $100,000 for a solution on our scale, could be better used to support district initiatives that improve classroom learning or value-added IT projects, such as building offsite disaster recovery capabilities… With Hyper-V, we have already saved $200,000 in hardware costs, and that’s just by targeting our oldest physical servers.”

“Using Cluster Shared Volumes, we don’t have to pre-allocate a tremendous amount of storage upfront for each one of the virtual machines: instead we can allocate as we go. That’s huge for us because otherwise we would have to pay for and set aside a lot of storage that may not be used for six months or a year.”