Windows Server 2008 R2 Migration
Hyper-V Scores Win Against VMware
CH2M Hill is a global engineering and consulting firm, with 23,500 employees and $6.3 billion in revenue for 2009. The company is entirely employee-owned...
CH2M Hill is a global engineering and consulting firm, with 23,500 employees and $6.3 billion in revenue for 2009. The company is entirely employee-owned and committed to innovative thinking, which is why it began phasing in server virtualization relatively early-on, starting in 2005. By 2007, the company had 450 virtualzed servers running on VMware ESX hypervisor technology. But it turns out that not all virtualization strategies are created equal. During the financial crisis of 2008-2009, CH2M discovered that its original investment in VMware was not cost-effective. "The company was cutting costs across the board, and we wanted to push forward with virtualizing more servers, especially in our field offices, but we just couldn't do it with VMware," said Greg Barton, a senior analyst in CH2M Hill's enterprise systems group. "VMware licensing costs were too high, but even more expensive was staffing costs: we couldn't afford to have VMware specialists in all our regional offices to manage that software." CH2M opted for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V virtualization technology instead, according to a statement released this week. Ultimately, the switch will save CH2M a bundle, increase uptime and availability, plus enable the company to simplify server management processes. "By switching to Microsoft from VMware, we will save $280,000 in software fees. Plus, we can now afford to tackle our 600 field servers and are aiming to virtualize 20 percent of these computers each year. At $5,000 a server, that's a savings of $3 million over the next three to five years," Barton stated. Hyper-V's server templates enable CH2M to streamline VM rollouts and empower individual business groups to create their own VMs without burdening IT. "We use the self-service portal in System Center Virtual Machine Manager to let business groups create their own virtual machines as needed and manage them themselves," Barton told Microsoft. "That's a big plus that we didn't have with VMware. This saves the IT staff a lot of time." CH2M is taking advantage of performance monitoring and dynamic optimization features, too. From the case study:
The IT staff has also linked System Center Virtual Machine Manager with System Center Operations Manager to take advantage of the Performance and Resource Optimization feature in System Center Virtual Machine Manager. With this feature, Barton and colleagues can keep tabs on virtual machine performance and create policies that instruct System Center Virtual Machine Manager, or a technician, to make needed changes, such as allocating more memory or CPU resources, so that application performance never suffers.All told, it looks like Hyper-V wins in terms of licensing costs, flexibility, and management ease. If you're looking to reap the most benefit from virtualization, Windows Server 2008 R2 is presenting a very credible alternative to VMware. Are you still in the evaluation phase of your virtualization initiative? Sound off in our comments section if you agree or disagree with CH2M's findings.
