Microsoft Virtualization: Customer Solution Case Study

University Hospital Trims IT Budget, Meets Needs Faster by Using Virtualization

OverviewCountry or Region: GermanyIndustry: Healthcare—Provider

Customer ProfileThe University Hospital Aachen (UKA) of Aachen, Germany, is a regional center of excellence in patient care, research, and teaching. Physicians see 245,000 patients a year and faculty teach 2,700 students.

Business SituationUKA wanted to extend its use of server virtualization to slow physical server growth and better meet business needs.

SolutionUKA deployed Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter with Hyper-V technology to gain cost-effective server virtualization and proceed with virtualizing its most demanding workloads, including SAP.

Benefits Server cost avoidance of U.S.$118,000 Database savings of $24,000 24/7 data center support Increased IT efficiency, productivity Faster response to business needs

“Higher server utilization with Hyper-V means that we do not have to spend $118,000 on new servers.”

Peter Asché, Chief Financial Officer, University Hospital Aachen

The University Hospital Aachen (UKA) in Aachen, Germany, needed to stem rising server costs and respond faster to business needs. To expand its use of server virtualization, UKA deployed the Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter operating system with Hyper-V technology. UKA was able to virtualize 45 percent of its server holdings, including demanding SAP and database workloads. The hospital has avoided U.S.$118,000 in server expenditures and trimmed annual energy costs. With a highly virtualized infrastructure, UKA can provide 24/7 support for all servers and applications. Because the IT staff can deploy new servers in hours rather than weeks and manage the infrastructure more efficiently using Microsoft System Center software, the IT staff can more promptly meet the needs of the business.

SituationThe University Hospital Aachen (UKA) is a modern medical center in Aachen, Germany, in the northwest corner of the country near the borders of Belgium and The Netherlands. More than 5,500 employees work under its massive roof to provide patient treatment, teaching, and research. Annually, UKA treats approximately 45,000 inpatients and 200,000 outpatients in its 1,510-bed facility. It also hosts the medical faculty of RWTH Aachen University, providing instruction to some 2,700 students of medicine and dentistry.

Like other university hospitals in the region, UKA faces budget deficits and constantly looks for ways to reduce costs. The IT department knew that a key avenue for savings lay in virtualizing more of its 550 servers. Many of the hospital’s older applications required 32-bit operating systems, so they could not take advantage of the increased memory and compute power of newer servers. Most UKA servers were thus running at only 10 or 20 percent of capacity, which meant that UKA had to continue buying more hardware to get the processing capacity it needed.

The IT staff had used VMware software to virtualize a few test systems but had been unable to more aggressively virtualize production workloads because of high VMware licensing costs. “We needed a more cost-effective virtualization solution if we were to continue cutting costs while delivering needed services,” says Peter Asché, Chief Financial Officer at University Hospital Aachen.

Apart from cost, UKA wanted to improve support and simplify data center management. “We wanted to offer 24/7 [24 hours a day, seven days a week] support and simply did not have the staff to do that in a nonvirtualized infrastructure,” says Oliver Kuhl, Team Leader, Central IT Services Group at University Hospital Aachen. “We wanted virtualization software that was easy for our Windows-trained IT staff to administer.”

The IT staff also wanted to reduce its Oracle database software costs in its SAP environment. To virtualize SAP with Oracle, the hospital would have to license a special clustered version of that database that would cost U.S.$24,000 and require extra hardware.

Ultimately, the inability to expand virtualization inhibited the IT staff’s ability to respond to the business. “We have constant demands for many different server configurations, on short order,” says Axel Blum, IT Services Manager at UKA. “But we sometimes had to turn business and research users away for lack of server budget or have them wait weeks or months.”

SolutionIn 2008, the hospital began standardizing its data center infrastructure on Microsoft technologies as a cost-cutting strategy, first migrating from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. After the Exchange Server project went well, Microsoft invited Blum and his colleagues to an infrastructure optimization workshop, where the Microsoft team confirmed that broader virtualization was indeed important to reducing costs.

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“We needed a more cost-effective virtualization solution if we were to continue cutting costs while delivering needed services.”

Peter Asché, Chief Financial Officer, University Hospital Aachen

At that time, Microsoft introduced the UKA team to the Hyper-V virtualization technology in the Windows Server 2008 operating system. “Hyper-V really appealed to us, because we were standardizing on Microsoft software, and we have a great deal of experience with Microsoft software,” says Wolfgang Nöldechen, SAP Administrator at UKA. “My team is mostly Windows trained, and our servers run Windows Server. Our management tools are made for Windows systems, plus we had good support from Windows.”

250 Virtual Machines on 45 HostsUKA initially deployed Windows Server 2008 Enterprise but later moved to Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter for new availability features in the R2 version and the more liberal licensing of the Datacenter edition. Datacenter provides an unlimited number of virtual operating system environments on a host server, whereas the Enterprise edition provides four virtual operating system instances per server.

In early 2010, UKA deployed Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter with Hyper-V technology on 45 host servers—Fujitsu blade servers with dual quad-core processors. On these 45 host servers, UKA has created 250 virtual machines—45 percent of its total server holdings. Virtual machine density ranges from 4 to 15 virtual machines per host.

UKA migrated its entire SAP suite to a virtual environment using Hyper-V and at the same time switched from Oracle database software to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 data management software. SAP runs

on two physical application servers and one database server. “We are using the same number of servers as before, but we have more flexibility,” says Nöldechen. “We can add more memory to our servers and start them up again. Moving databases between hosts is also a lot easier than it was in a physical-server world.”

The hospital also moved its Citrix environment to Hyper-V. The approximately 1,600 concurrent users of the hospital information system can access it using Remote Desktop Services and Citrix software, and those 100 servers now run as virtual machines under Hyper-V.

Single-Console ManagementThe UKA IT staff uses Microsoft System Center data center solutions to manage its physical and virtual infrastructure. It used Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 to migrate its physical server–based applications to Hyper-V. It also uses this program to deploy virtual machines, move virtual machines from one host server to another, and view the status and health of all the applications running across its data center.

The IT staff uses Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 to deploy applications and security updates to its desktop computers, 370 physical servers, and 250 virtual servers. It uses Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 to monitor both physical and virtual servers from a single console. “The System Center suite makes the management of Windows-based servers a lot easier,” says Kuhl. “We get notifications when server health is failing, so we can act proactively

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“The System Center suite makes the management of Windows-based servers a lot easier.”

Oliver Kuhl, Team Leader, Central IT Services Group, University Hospital

Aachen

to address problems before they take down a server.”

BenefitsBy virtualizing its data center with Hyper-V, University Hospital Aachen has been able to reduce hardware and software costs, provide 24/7 support, streamline IT processes, and better meet business needs for new IT services.

Server Cost Avoidance of $118,000 By virtualizing 45 percent of its servers—250 of 550—UKA is able to increase server utilization from 10 or 20 percent to 60 or 70 percent. “Higher server utilization with Hyper-V means that we do not have to spend $118,000 on new servers,” Asché says. Also, virtualization helps UKA trim rising energy costs. According to a Microsoft energy calculator tool, UKA is saving $162,671 annually on energy by virtualizing 250 of its 550 servers.

“In 2009, our IT department was able to cut its budget by 5 percent to meet a university deficit,” says Asché. “We were able to accomplish this by using virtualization and Hyper-V.”

Database Savings of $24,000 The hospital was also able to eliminate Oracle from its SAP environment and avoid the $24,000 cost of licensing Oracle Real Application Clusters and buying the hardware needed for Oracle clustering. It also eliminated the high cost of administering Oracle databases, a $97,000 annual cost. By using Hyper-V, UKA gained an out-of-the-box virtualization solution for SAP by using SQL Server 2008.

24/7 Data Center Support

By virtualizing nearly half of its data center servers, UKA was able to provide 24/7 support for all applications and servers, which it simply did not have having the staff to do in a nonvirtualized environment.

Increased IT Efficiency, ProductivityBy using System Center Virtual Machine Manager, the UKA IT staff can deploy a virtual machine in hours versus the weeks or months it takes to order, unpack, configure, rack, and test a physical server. The staff reaps additional efficiencies by using the centralized software deployment and server monitoring capabilities provided by System Center Configuration Manager and System Center Operations Manager. By using these tools, a small IT staff can multiply its reach and effectiveness, doing more with less.

“The increased efficiency of a virtualized data center means that we are able to fill our IT staff’s time with more valuable services,” Blum says. “Instead of spending a week deploying two servers for one business group, we can spend a week deploying virtual machines for five business groups.”

Faster Response to Business NeedsThe more efficient IT staff now can more readily meet the technology needs of the business. “A key benefit of using Hyper-V is the ability to more efficiently deploy servers when our business needs them,” Blum says. “Rather than making business and research groups wait weeks or months, or turning them away altogether, we can deploy virtual machines in hours.”

“If we didn’t have virtualization, we wouldn’t be where we are now, because we

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“Rather than making business and research groups wait weeks or months, or turning them away altogether, we can deploy virtual machines in hours.”

Axel Blum, IT Services Manager, University Hospital Aachen

did not have the budget to purchase 250 new servers to fill the needs that our 250 Hyper-V virtual machines fill,” Blum says. “Those business needs would simply have been unmet.”

In effort to further cut costs, UKA is working with the University Hospital in Maastricht, The Netherlands, across the border, to consolidate common internal services such as IT. “Our two university hospitals plan to create the first cross-border university hospital, and having a Microsoft infrastructure will help us manage two data centers more easily and cost effectively,” says Asché.

Microsoft VirtualizationMicrosoft virtualization is an end-to-end strategy that can profoundly affect nearly every aspect of the IT infrastructure management lifecycle. It can drive greater efficiencies, flexibility, and cost effectiveness throughout your organization. From accelerating application deployments; to ensuring systems, applications, and data are always available; to taking the hassle out of rebuilding and shutting down servers and desktops for testing and development; to reducing risk, slashing costs, and improving the agility of your entire environment—virtualization has the

power to transform your infrastructure, from the data center to the desktop.

For more information about Microsoft virtualization solutions, go to: www.microsoft.com/virtualization

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about University Hospital Aachen services, visit the website at: www.ukaachen.de

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published June 2011

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio− Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter− Microsoft System Center

Configuration Manager 2007− Microsoft System Center Operations

Manager 2007 R2− Microsoft System Center Virtual

Machine Manager 2008 R2

Technologies− Hyper-V

Hardware 45 Fujitsu blade servers with two quad-

core processors