Indiana U. Moves to Virtualization
Kelley School of Business deploys solution across entire infrastructure
The challenge for one of the country’s top business schools, Kelley School of Business at Indiana University at Bloomington, was to improve IT services while cutting spending and expose students to virtualization technology, which is a vital part of datacenters.
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The solution was to use VMware technology across the school's infrastructure and in the classroom to improve IT services, pare costs, and give students the virtualization know-how they need to succeed in the work force.
To do that, the Kelley School used VMware Infrastructure 3 Enterprise, featuring:
- ESX 3 with VMFS
- vCenter 2
- VMware Workstation The deployment environment included:
- Hardware: HP Proliant DL385 attached to an ECM CX3-20 SAN
- Operating systems: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5, Microsoft Windows Server 2000 and 2003, Windows XP, Vista, and Cacti
- Mission-critical applications running in production in virtual machines: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and 2008, SharePoint 2.0 and 3.0, and Symantec Ghost
The university began virtualizing its datacenters with VMware Infrastructure in 2001. Encouraged by those results, the Kelley School decided to experiment with VMware technology. "We started a project to virtualize just my labs about four or five years ago," recalls Jared Beard, associate director of the Kelley School's Information Technology Labs and Studios. "The pilot was such a success, we used it to make the business case for expanding our VMware implementation. These days most of our new servers are virtualized. In fact, VMware virtual machines have become our de facto standard and our environment is now 100 percent virtualized."
The drive for greener IT is a key reason the Kelley School favors virtual machines over physical hosts. "The university is pursuing a major green initiative, and our group is at the forefront of that," Beard explains. "Virtualization is a very simple way of going green because it lets us run a system that's as streamlined as it's going to get.When we need more servers, we use VMware software to add virtual ones.We don't have to go out and buy new hardware, more UPS, or additional infrastructure."
Besides making it easier to be green, the Kelley School has reaped a slew of other benefits from deploying VMware Infrastructure, including dramatically lowering hardware costs as a result of migrating from twenty IBM servers to a single HP platform, a CPU-utilization rate that's jumped from around 2 percent to 70 percent,and far easier and faster server provisioning and maintenance.
"We've been able to increase the services that we offer, providing servers to our faculty and students much faster than we'd ever anticipated,"Beard reports. "Best of all, we've increased those services while substantially cutting costs."
Cutting costs is important at the state-funded Kelley School, which, like so many other schools and businesses these days, is looking for ways to tighten its belt."The State of Indiana is going through tough financial times like everyone, so we're doing some restructuring to increase efficiencies," Beard says. "VMware technology is a big part of our effort, as it lets us do more with less."
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As Beard sees it, the role of IT is changing at the school. Not only is IT becoming viewed as a source of savings rather than just a cost center, but it's also becoming a more vital part of the Kelley School's curriculum. "We're putting more emphasis on information technology as a critical part of not only the operations side of the school, but also of the school's educational mission," he says.
Beard has observed that shift firsthand, as he also teaches in the Kelley School's Masters in Science Information Service program, which confers a business-based IT degree. "The course I teach is pretty exciting, because students get a full-scale immersion in the language of managing networks," he says. "And when we get to the server part of managing those networks, I don't even teach them about individual servers, beyond the concept that they exist. We go straight into virtualization, which is exciting for students. Their eyes pop when they realize, for instance, that the print server they just printed a document to does not physically exist."
IT becoming viewed as a source of savings—not just a cost center. In the lab portion of Beard's course, each student works with VMware ESX 3 to build at least two virtual machines:one running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server, the other Windows 2008 Server. "I created a small network, installed ESX on several servers, then deployed virtual machines consisting of various operating systems and appliances to monitor the network," reports Andrew Grossi, a recent course graduate. "That whole process took just hours, as opposed to the days or weeks it would have taken with physical instead of virtual machines."
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