Wells Dairy Renews Focus on Operational Efficiency; Saves More Than $500,000
Wells' Dairy was founded in 1913 when Fred H. Wells paid dairy farmer Ray Bowers $250 for a horse, a delivery wagon and a guaranteed source of raw milk. Today, Wells' Dairy is the largest family-owned and managed ice cream manufacturer in the United States. It offers a variety of frozen dairy products, including ice cream and frozen novelties under the BLUE BUNNY label. The company operates two ice cream plants in Le Mars, Iowa, and a third plant in St. George, Utah. At the three locations, Wells' Dairy employs a total of more than 2,500 production, sales, office and support personnel.
However, like many other commodity-driven manufacturers, Wells' Dairy is facing some challenges. In recent years, a volatile commodity market has made it difficult to forecast costs and optimize pricing. For Wells' Dairy, today's economic climate spells a renewed emphasis on operational efficiency to maintain year-over-year growth -- and the IT department has a role to play.
"Our goal is to support the business through optimal IT infrastructure and services," says Mike Kooistra, director of Information Services at Wells' Dairy. "We are very focused on strategic planning. We believe that a long-term vision of efficient and consolidated technologies delivers better value than short-term fixes."
Early Steps to Virtualization
In 2005, the IT department began acting on this vision through an early foray into virtualization. The two system administrators, who run the portion of the data center that houses servers running the Windows operating system, had watched as server sprawl and a limited number of test servers took their toll on costs and business agility.
"Many projects didn't have the budget for test and development servers, and it took too long to manually provision the hardware," says Steve Spieler, Windows system engineer at Wells' Dairy. "We knew that as the business grew, these problems would only get worse."
Wells' Dairy evaluated another virtualization solution for Windows-based servers, but chose Microsoft instead. "In contrast, when Microsoft released Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, it was a more familiar and cost-effective solution with all the functionality we needed," says Spieler. "We felt Microsoft virtualization technologies would provide better long-term value."
Wells' Dairy used Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 to consolidate servers, streamline its test and development cycles, and gradually migrate some minor business applications into a virtualized production environment. However, as the business grew, the IT team felt there was room for improvement.
Ongoing Challenges
Spieler and his colleagues still manually performed physical-to-virtual (P2V) migrations, and while Wells' Dairy had made progress by virtualizing 75 of its 165 physical machines, there were some important applications that did not perform well in this environment. One was a Web application used by a large number of operations, logistics, and management personnel to monitor real-time performance statistics for production lines at all three plants. The benefit of this application's real-time capabilities was minimized somewhat by its sluggish performance. And the IT department was unable to move forward with virtualizing memory-intensive, multi-core workloads or any applications that ran on a 64-bit operating system.
Wells' Dairy wanted to take advantage of virtualization for high availability through server clustering, but the real benefit of this comes into play with mission-critical applications running in the production environment. However, the IT staff felt its critical business applications were not a good fit for its current virtualization environment. For example, it could not virtualize a demand planning and forecasting application, which has multi-core processors. "At the time, virtualizing didn't seem a viable option," says Spieler.
As the number of virtualized machines grew, Spieler and his colleague lacked a set of integrated tools that would help them handle both the physical and the virtualized environments under their care. They used Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 to monitor the health of their physical servers, but it required a separate console to access the Virtual Server 2005 management tools.
Wells' Dairy also wanted to replicate its production environment within its disaster recovery center server by server; however, with the 90 physical servers remaining in its data center, this was just too expensive.
"We had made strides, virtualizing about 75 servers, but it just wasn't enough," says Spieler. "If we could virtualize more servers, we could reduce costs for the disaster recovery center."
Wells' Dairy IT staff members were anxious to expand the company's virtualized environment to form the basis of a more efficient IT infrastructure and increase the cost savings it had already achieved.
Solution
When Wells' Dairy was invited to join the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Technology Adoption Program (TAP) in April 2008, it jumped at the opportunity to evaluate the latest virtualization technology from Microsoft.
"We knew we wanted the virtualization technology to integrate into our Windows environment. Hyper-V is cost effective and easy to use," says Kooistra. "And the Microsoft concept of virtualization from the data center to the desktop and a single set of integrated management tools bode well for the long-term."
Hyper-V virtualization technology is a feature of the Windows Server 2008 operating system, and the IT team deployed Windows Server 2008 Datacenter for its high reliability, scalability, and large-scale virtualization capabilities. It also chose the Server Core installation option that features a limited subset of the operating system's functionality.
"Server Core reduces the need for rebooting and patching, and it cuts down on vulnerabilities through a reduced attack surface," says Spieler.
Wells' Dairy purchased two Dell PowerEdge servers for its Hyper-V virtualization solution, and the IT team familiarized itself with the technology by migrating test virtual machines from the virtual server environment.
"We had great support from our Microsoft TAP contact," says Spieler. "We worked through several versions of the product in the test environment; then, we started migrating less critical Web and application servers over to Hyper-V in the production environment."
Choosing an Integrated Suite of Tools
As part of its virtualization project, Wells' Dairy also acquired the license for the Microsoft System Center Server Management Suite Enterprise. This includes Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, System Center Operations Manager 2007, System Center Configuration Manager 2007, and System Center Data Protection Manager 2007. Additionally, the Enterprise edition of the suite includes the right to manage an unlimited number of operating system environments on a single server.
"We chose the Enterprise edition because it includes System Center Virtual Machine Manager and the rights to manage an unlimited number of operating system environments," says Spieler. "For my colleague and me, the Microsoft integrated physical and virtual management solution looked like a compelling time-saver."
The IT team started to work with System Center Virtual Machine Manager in May of 2008 to migrate virtual machines from Virtual Server 2005 to Hyper-V. By the time it received the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager, Spieler and his colleague had perfected the process.
"Once you add the Virtual Machine Manager agent to the Virtual Server 2005 hosts, it's just a matter of selecting the button to migrate the virtual machines and following the wizard," says Spieler. "The wizard uninstalls the Virtual Server components, copies the virtual hard disk over to Hyper-V, and installs the integration components for Hyper-V on the new virtual machine--all in one seamless process."
One reason this was a straightforward task is that the virtual hard disk (VHD) format for Virtual Server 2005 is the same as for Hyper-V. The VHD emulates disk drives for virtual machines that do not depend on specific hardware configurations.
New Virtualization Environment
Next, the IT team members performed P2V conversions, adding new virtual machines to the production environment that they could not virtualize previously. The team took advantage of another wizard in System Center Virtual Machine Manager. "Using the wizard took only five minutes; the bulk of the job was copying the hard drive from the physical computer to the Hyper-V server," reports Spieler.
The company now has 10 physical servers running Windows Server 2008 Datacenter and Hyper-V, with a total of 115 virtual machines. Six stand-alone servers host virtual machines in the production, test, and development environments.
However, for more mission-critical production applications, the team took advantage of Windows Server 2008 Failover Cluster Management console functions for the Hyper-V role and introduced host clustering into its virtualized environment. The data center now has four servers in a single cluster that host important applications such as Windows Server 2008 Domain Controllers, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, servers hosting electronic data interchange systems, and a plant maintenance management system.
"As we grow our virtualized environment, we'll add more nodes to the failover cluster to provide that extra level of support and availability for our production applications," says Spieler. "With the scalability built into Hyper-V, we have plenty of room to add virtual machines."
The IT team is also beginning to use System Center Configuration Manager to manage both its virtual and physical server software and System Center Operations Manager for alerting the staff if a virtual or a physical server goes below a pre-set performance level. Wells' Dairy also joined the TAP for System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 and is successfully backing up its Hyper-V servers as well as Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 e-mail messaging and collaboration software and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 data management software.
"We are looking into virtualizing these workloads in the future," says Kooistra. "We will first virtualize Exchange Server 2007 Hub Transport and Client Access roles, then possibly Exchange Server 2007 Mailbox roles. SQL Server 2008 is planned for further in the future."
Benefits
Today, the IT department at Wells' Dairy is using its virtualization solution from Microsoft to support the business in challenging economic times. The IT department is building a more efficient infrastructure that is reducing data center and licensing costs, driving business agility, improving IT manageability, and better supporting business goals.
"We see a long-term alliance between Microsoft and Wells' Dairy along the virtualization path," says Kooistra. "This is in accordance with our business strategy to standardize on technologies that we can grow with."
Building a "Green" Data Center
Since deploying Hyper-V, Wells' Dairy has reduced the number of physical servers in its data center by 27 machines. It expects to retire another 12 machines in 2009, leaving the data center with 51 servers instead of the 90 it had before the System Center Virtual Machine Manager TAP.
Now the IT department can support the business with less hardware, which means lower equipment costs, reduced electrical consumption for server power and cooling, and less physical space. For Wells' Dairy this is a significant step forward in building a greener data center.
"We are saving more than 25 percent on electrical costs to our data center by implementing Microsoft's virtualization. This percentage includes power to the servers and power for the cooling of those servers," says Spieler. "If we did not virtualize servers, we would have had to add another cooling unit, UPS, and network ports to handle the demand. We don't have to do that now."
After consolidating multiple workloads on fewer blade servers, Wells' Dairy is enjoying considerable equipment savings -- $25,500 for network ports alone. "We've saved another $481,250 on hardware and software costs," says Spieler. "In total, we saved $519,000 on hardware and software since we started our server consolidation efforts with Hyper-V."
Saving on Licensing Costs
With Windows Server 2008 Datacenter, Wells' Dairy gained unlimited virtualization rights that significantly extend the savings it has already realized through server consolidation using Hyper-V.
The company gained significant cost benefits by choosing Windows Server Datacenter and virtualization instead of managing multiple physical servers. At Wells' Dairy, each of the servers running Hyper-V has dual, quad-core processors. This requires two Windows Server 2008 Datacenter licenses. "As we have one Hyper-V server currently running 25 virtual machines, we are saving on licenses for those 25 server instances," explains Spieler. Previously, Wells' Dairy would have incurred costly licensing fees to run both the Enterprise and Standard editions of Windows Server 2008. "Once we deduct the amount we paid for the Windows Server 2008 Datacenter licenses, we have a total savings of $41,000," says Spieler.
Kooistra continues, "Unlimited virtualization for Windows Server 2008 Datacenter licensing significantly enhances the value proposition for virtual machine deployment and ensures that we will continue with this cost-effective strategy for the long term."
This does not include additional savings derived from the company's System Center Server Management Suite Enterprise. With this suite, Wells' Dairy gained the rights to manage an unlimited number of operating system environments on a single physical server. So, Wells' Dairy purchases one license per Hyper-V server and then installs the System Center software agents on each virtual machine. For the price of that one license, the IT staff can use any of the System Center products included in the suite to monitor, configure, perform software inventories, install updates, and perform backups on all its virtual machines.
Driving Business Agility
Wells' Dairy data center staff now has a more efficient, flexible test environment, so more business projects at Wells' Dairy can be launched into production. Instead of business groups having to budget and compete for a limited number of test servers, the IT team can use Hyper-V to comply with their requests and rapidly model different scenarios in a virtualized environment.
"It used to take us half a day to a day to bring up a new physical server, depending on what application needed to be installed, but in the virtualized world, we can configure a server within the hour," says Spieler. "And as we build a library of offline virtual machines, this will become even faster."
Improving IT Manageability
Using Microsoft System Center software, Spieler and his colleague are saving time by managing both the physical and virtual environments in the data center so they can contribute to more strategic projects. By taking advantage of the single administration console for all System Center products, the two IT staffers have complete control over the entire Windows-server based side of the data center.
"We are making use of the virtual template library for a centralized view of all virtual machines in our environment," says Spieler. "You can mount these on the fly through the Virtual Machine Manager console, and it's nice to go in there and do a query on stopped virtual machines. We are also looking into the self-service provisioning portal, where I can give a specific IT team ownership of a particular virtual machine to create and delete for projects."
Wells' Dairy estimates that its virtualization solution from Microsoft has contributed to cost savings of at least one full-time equivalent employee in the data center.
Improving Business Continuity
Now that Hyper-V provides a robust, stable virtualized environment, Wells' Dairy can virtualize business-critical applications and take advantage of the clustering and network load balancing features in Windows Server 2008 Datacenter. This is important for those applications that have a direct relationship to plant production, such as the Web application that Wells' Dairy employees use to monitor real-time performance statistics and optimize production around the clock.
"Our goal is to ensure business-critical systems are always available, and with Hyper-V in a cluster configuration, we can make good on that goal," says Spieler. "If we have a hardware issue on one of the Hyper-V servers, we don't have to worry. The virtual machines will failover automatically between the Hyper-V nodes in a short amount of time."
Now that Wells' Dairy has made progress with Hyper-V and deployed System Center Data Protection Manager, the company has completed its new disaster recovery center. The IT team was able to move ahead with the server-for-server plan for the disaster recovery center for two reasons. First, the IT staff used Hyper-V to consolidate more servers, reducing the number of physical servers they needed to be replicated in the disaster center. Second, the virtualized world tends to be more hardware agnostic, which gives Wells' Dairy more flexibility in matching the physical servers because they no longer have to be exactly the same make and model.
"We could have a Dell server here in our production data center, but we could use a different vendor's hardware at the disaster recovery site and just load Hyper-V on it and bring up the virtual machine," says Spieler. "Our disaster recovery project is a huge success for the business," says Spieler. "Our executives see that as well--we can have a number of these virtual machines up and going in a short amount of time and all the data will be there. It's huge for the company."
The company also has a second server running System Center Data Protection Manager at the disaster recovery center that is backing up the Data Protection Manager server at the production data center. This way, the company has all the virtual machines readily available at the disaster recovery site to bring online in the event of an emergency.
Enabling Better Business Support
Before Hyper-V, there were limits to what Wells' Dairy IT staff could do with its virtualization solution. This impacted the IT department's ability to serve the business. With Hyper-V these impediments disappeared and the department can assume a more proactive, supportive role in helping Wells' Dairy grow the business.
"The huge performance improvements with Hyper-V was an early indicator that we had a technology we could use to provide better service to the business," says Kooistra. "For example, now we can virtualize our demand planning and forecasting application.
Spieler adds, "We are also thinking about deploying the application virtualization solution from Microsoft to virtualize [applications in] the 2007 Microsoft Office system on the desktop so it can coexist with Office 2003 while our employees familiarize themselves with the new interface. With a completely integrated set of virtualization and management technologies, a Microsoft virtualization solution will carry us well into the future."
However, like many other commodity-driven manufacturers, Wells' Dairy is facing some challenges. In recent years, a volatile commodity market has made it difficult to forecast costs and optimize pricing. For Wells' Dairy, today's economic climate spells a renewed emphasis on operational efficiency to maintain year-over-year growth -- and the IT department has a role to play.
"Our goal is to support the business through optimal IT infrastructure and services," says Mike Kooistra, director of Information Services at Wells' Dairy. "We are very focused on strategic planning. We believe that a long-term vision of efficient and consolidated technologies delivers better value than short-term fixes."
Early Steps to Virtualization
In 2005, the IT department began acting on this vision through an early foray into virtualization. The two system administrators, who run the portion of the data center that houses servers running the Windows operating system, had watched as server sprawl and a limited number of test servers took their toll on costs and business agility.
"Many projects didn't have the budget for test and development servers, and it took too long to manually provision the hardware," says Steve Spieler, Windows system engineer at Wells' Dairy. "We knew that as the business grew, these problems would only get worse."
Wells' Dairy evaluated another virtualization solution for Windows-based servers, but chose Microsoft instead. "In contrast, when Microsoft released Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, it was a more familiar and cost-effective solution with all the functionality we needed," says Spieler. "We felt Microsoft virtualization technologies would provide better long-term value."
Wells' Dairy used Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 to consolidate servers, streamline its test and development cycles, and gradually migrate some minor business applications into a virtualized production environment. However, as the business grew, the IT team felt there was room for improvement.
Ongoing Challenges
Spieler and his colleagues still manually performed physical-to-virtual (P2V) migrations, and while Wells' Dairy had made progress by virtualizing 75 of its 165 physical machines, there were some important applications that did not perform well in this environment. One was a Web application used by a large number of operations, logistics, and management personnel to monitor real-time performance statistics for production lines at all three plants. The benefit of this application's real-time capabilities was minimized somewhat by its sluggish performance. And the IT department was unable to move forward with virtualizing memory-intensive, multi-core workloads or any applications that ran on a 64-bit operating system.
Wells' Dairy wanted to take advantage of virtualization for high availability through server clustering, but the real benefit of this comes into play with mission-critical applications running in the production environment. However, the IT staff felt its critical business applications were not a good fit for its current virtualization environment. For example, it could not virtualize a demand planning and forecasting application, which has multi-core processors. "At the time, virtualizing didn't seem a viable option," says Spieler.
As the number of virtualized machines grew, Spieler and his colleague lacked a set of integrated tools that would help them handle both the physical and the virtualized environments under their care. They used Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 to monitor the health of their physical servers, but it required a separate console to access the Virtual Server 2005 management tools.
Wells' Dairy also wanted to replicate its production environment within its disaster recovery center server by server; however, with the 90 physical servers remaining in its data center, this was just too expensive.
"We had made strides, virtualizing about 75 servers, but it just wasn't enough," says Spieler. "If we could virtualize more servers, we could reduce costs for the disaster recovery center."
Wells' Dairy IT staff members were anxious to expand the company's virtualized environment to form the basis of a more efficient IT infrastructure and increase the cost savings it had already achieved.
Solution
When Wells' Dairy was invited to join the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Technology Adoption Program (TAP) in April 2008, it jumped at the opportunity to evaluate the latest virtualization technology from Microsoft.
"We knew we wanted the virtualization technology to integrate into our Windows environment. Hyper-V is cost effective and easy to use," says Kooistra. "And the Microsoft concept of virtualization from the data center to the desktop and a single set of integrated management tools bode well for the long-term."
Hyper-V virtualization technology is a feature of the Windows Server 2008 operating system, and the IT team deployed Windows Server 2008 Datacenter for its high reliability, scalability, and large-scale virtualization capabilities. It also chose the Server Core installation option that features a limited subset of the operating system's functionality.
"Server Core reduces the need for rebooting and patching, and it cuts down on vulnerabilities through a reduced attack surface," says Spieler.
Wells' Dairy purchased two Dell PowerEdge servers for its Hyper-V virtualization solution, and the IT team familiarized itself with the technology by migrating test virtual machines from the virtual server environment.
"We had great support from our Microsoft TAP contact," says Spieler. "We worked through several versions of the product in the test environment; then, we started migrating less critical Web and application servers over to Hyper-V in the production environment."
Choosing an Integrated Suite of Tools
As part of its virtualization project, Wells' Dairy also acquired the license for the Microsoft System Center Server Management Suite Enterprise. This includes Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, System Center Operations Manager 2007, System Center Configuration Manager 2007, and System Center Data Protection Manager 2007. Additionally, the Enterprise edition of the suite includes the right to manage an unlimited number of operating system environments on a single server.
"We chose the Enterprise edition because it includes System Center Virtual Machine Manager and the rights to manage an unlimited number of operating system environments," says Spieler. "For my colleague and me, the Microsoft integrated physical and virtual management solution looked like a compelling time-saver."
The IT team started to work with System Center Virtual Machine Manager in May of 2008 to migrate virtual machines from Virtual Server 2005 to Hyper-V. By the time it received the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager, Spieler and his colleague had perfected the process.
"Once you add the Virtual Machine Manager agent to the Virtual Server 2005 hosts, it's just a matter of selecting the button to migrate the virtual machines and following the wizard," says Spieler. "The wizard uninstalls the Virtual Server components, copies the virtual hard disk over to Hyper-V, and installs the integration components for Hyper-V on the new virtual machine--all in one seamless process."
One reason this was a straightforward task is that the virtual hard disk (VHD) format for Virtual Server 2005 is the same as for Hyper-V. The VHD emulates disk drives for virtual machines that do not depend on specific hardware configurations.
New Virtualization Environment
Next, the IT team members performed P2V conversions, adding new virtual machines to the production environment that they could not virtualize previously. The team took advantage of another wizard in System Center Virtual Machine Manager. "Using the wizard took only five minutes; the bulk of the job was copying the hard drive from the physical computer to the Hyper-V server," reports Spieler.
The company now has 10 physical servers running Windows Server 2008 Datacenter and Hyper-V, with a total of 115 virtual machines. Six stand-alone servers host virtual machines in the production, test, and development environments.
However, for more mission-critical production applications, the team took advantage of Windows Server 2008 Failover Cluster Management console functions for the Hyper-V role and introduced host clustering into its virtualized environment. The data center now has four servers in a single cluster that host important applications such as Windows Server 2008 Domain Controllers, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, servers hosting electronic data interchange systems, and a plant maintenance management system.
"As we grow our virtualized environment, we'll add more nodes to the failover cluster to provide that extra level of support and availability for our production applications," says Spieler. "With the scalability built into Hyper-V, we have plenty of room to add virtual machines."
The IT team is also beginning to use System Center Configuration Manager to manage both its virtual and physical server software and System Center Operations Manager for alerting the staff if a virtual or a physical server goes below a pre-set performance level. Wells' Dairy also joined the TAP for System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 and is successfully backing up its Hyper-V servers as well as Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 e-mail messaging and collaboration software and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 data management software.
"We are looking into virtualizing these workloads in the future," says Kooistra. "We will first virtualize Exchange Server 2007 Hub Transport and Client Access roles, then possibly Exchange Server 2007 Mailbox roles. SQL Server 2008 is planned for further in the future."
Benefits
Today, the IT department at Wells' Dairy is using its virtualization solution from Microsoft to support the business in challenging economic times. The IT department is building a more efficient infrastructure that is reducing data center and licensing costs, driving business agility, improving IT manageability, and better supporting business goals.
"We see a long-term alliance between Microsoft and Wells' Dairy along the virtualization path," says Kooistra. "This is in accordance with our business strategy to standardize on technologies that we can grow with."
Building a "Green" Data Center
Since deploying Hyper-V, Wells' Dairy has reduced the number of physical servers in its data center by 27 machines. It expects to retire another 12 machines in 2009, leaving the data center with 51 servers instead of the 90 it had before the System Center Virtual Machine Manager TAP.
Now the IT department can support the business with less hardware, which means lower equipment costs, reduced electrical consumption for server power and cooling, and less physical space. For Wells' Dairy this is a significant step forward in building a greener data center.
"We are saving more than 25 percent on electrical costs to our data center by implementing Microsoft's virtualization. This percentage includes power to the servers and power for the cooling of those servers," says Spieler. "If we did not virtualize servers, we would have had to add another cooling unit, UPS, and network ports to handle the demand. We don't have to do that now."
After consolidating multiple workloads on fewer blade servers, Wells' Dairy is enjoying considerable equipment savings -- $25,500 for network ports alone. "We've saved another $481,250 on hardware and software costs," says Spieler. "In total, we saved $519,000 on hardware and software since we started our server consolidation efforts with Hyper-V."
Saving on Licensing Costs
With Windows Server 2008 Datacenter, Wells' Dairy gained unlimited virtualization rights that significantly extend the savings it has already realized through server consolidation using Hyper-V.
The company gained significant cost benefits by choosing Windows Server Datacenter and virtualization instead of managing multiple physical servers. At Wells' Dairy, each of the servers running Hyper-V has dual, quad-core processors. This requires two Windows Server 2008 Datacenter licenses. "As we have one Hyper-V server currently running 25 virtual machines, we are saving on licenses for those 25 server instances," explains Spieler. Previously, Wells' Dairy would have incurred costly licensing fees to run both the Enterprise and Standard editions of Windows Server 2008. "Once we deduct the amount we paid for the Windows Server 2008 Datacenter licenses, we have a total savings of $41,000," says Spieler.
Kooistra continues, "Unlimited virtualization for Windows Server 2008 Datacenter licensing significantly enhances the value proposition for virtual machine deployment and ensures that we will continue with this cost-effective strategy for the long term."
This does not include additional savings derived from the company's System Center Server Management Suite Enterprise. With this suite, Wells' Dairy gained the rights to manage an unlimited number of operating system environments on a single physical server. So, Wells' Dairy purchases one license per Hyper-V server and then installs the System Center software agents on each virtual machine. For the price of that one license, the IT staff can use any of the System Center products included in the suite to monitor, configure, perform software inventories, install updates, and perform backups on all its virtual machines.
Driving Business Agility
Wells' Dairy data center staff now has a more efficient, flexible test environment, so more business projects at Wells' Dairy can be launched into production. Instead of business groups having to budget and compete for a limited number of test servers, the IT team can use Hyper-V to comply with their requests and rapidly model different scenarios in a virtualized environment.
"It used to take us half a day to a day to bring up a new physical server, depending on what application needed to be installed, but in the virtualized world, we can configure a server within the hour," says Spieler. "And as we build a library of offline virtual machines, this will become even faster."
Improving IT Manageability
Using Microsoft System Center software, Spieler and his colleague are saving time by managing both the physical and virtual environments in the data center so they can contribute to more strategic projects. By taking advantage of the single administration console for all System Center products, the two IT staffers have complete control over the entire Windows-server based side of the data center.
"We are making use of the virtual template library for a centralized view of all virtual machines in our environment," says Spieler. "You can mount these on the fly through the Virtual Machine Manager console, and it's nice to go in there and do a query on stopped virtual machines. We are also looking into the self-service provisioning portal, where I can give a specific IT team ownership of a particular virtual machine to create and delete for projects."
Wells' Dairy estimates that its virtualization solution from Microsoft has contributed to cost savings of at least one full-time equivalent employee in the data center.
Improving Business Continuity
Now that Hyper-V provides a robust, stable virtualized environment, Wells' Dairy can virtualize business-critical applications and take advantage of the clustering and network load balancing features in Windows Server 2008 Datacenter. This is important for those applications that have a direct relationship to plant production, such as the Web application that Wells' Dairy employees use to monitor real-time performance statistics and optimize production around the clock.
"Our goal is to ensure business-critical systems are always available, and with Hyper-V in a cluster configuration, we can make good on that goal," says Spieler. "If we have a hardware issue on one of the Hyper-V servers, we don't have to worry. The virtual machines will failover automatically between the Hyper-V nodes in a short amount of time."
Now that Wells' Dairy has made progress with Hyper-V and deployed System Center Data Protection Manager, the company has completed its new disaster recovery center. The IT team was able to move ahead with the server-for-server plan for the disaster recovery center for two reasons. First, the IT staff used Hyper-V to consolidate more servers, reducing the number of physical servers they needed to be replicated in the disaster center. Second, the virtualized world tends to be more hardware agnostic, which gives Wells' Dairy more flexibility in matching the physical servers because they no longer have to be exactly the same make and model.
"We could have a Dell server here in our production data center, but we could use a different vendor's hardware at the disaster recovery site and just load Hyper-V on it and bring up the virtual machine," says Spieler. "Our disaster recovery project is a huge success for the business," says Spieler. "Our executives see that as well--we can have a number of these virtual machines up and going in a short amount of time and all the data will be there. It's huge for the company."
The company also has a second server running System Center Data Protection Manager at the disaster recovery center that is backing up the Data Protection Manager server at the production data center. This way, the company has all the virtual machines readily available at the disaster recovery site to bring online in the event of an emergency.
Enabling Better Business Support
Before Hyper-V, there were limits to what Wells' Dairy IT staff could do with its virtualization solution. This impacted the IT department's ability to serve the business. With Hyper-V these impediments disappeared and the department can assume a more proactive, supportive role in helping Wells' Dairy grow the business.
"The huge performance improvements with Hyper-V was an early indicator that we had a technology we could use to provide better service to the business," says Kooistra. "For example, now we can virtualize our demand planning and forecasting application.
Spieler adds, "We are also thinking about deploying the application virtualization solution from Microsoft to virtualize [applications in] the 2007 Microsoft Office system on the desktop so it can coexist with Office 2003 while our employees familiarize themselves with the new interface. With a completely integrated set of virtualization and management technologies, a Microsoft virtualization solution will carry us well into the future."