Microsoft Virtualization: Customer Solution Case Study

Networking Company Virtualizes Servers, Avoids $1.96 million in Hardware Costs

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Information technology

Customer ProfileHeadquartered in San Jose, California, Brocade offers a range of Ethernet, storage, and converged networking solutions to customers in more than 160 countries. It employs 4,600 people.

Business SituationTo prevent server sprawl and reduce infrastructure management, Brocade wanted to expand its virtualization solution.

SolutionBrocade chose the Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter operating system with Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center data center solutions to manage its infrastructure.

Benefits Reduced costs Improved server utilization, application

performance Increased employee productivity Enabled IT to better support the

business

“The global server consolidation and streamlined management capabilities we gain with our Microsoft Virtualization solution contribute to a dynamic infrastructure for growing Brocade’s business.”

Doug Lind, Lead Windows Architect, Brocade

Brocade builds data center networking products. The company had an outdated virtualization solution that hosted 70 virtual machines running the Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard and Enterprise operating systems. IT staffers were concerned about performance and reliability. Instead of upgrading its existing solution, Brocade used Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter with Hyper-V to virtualize 445 servers. IT also virtualized 275 desktop computers to solve network latency issues experienced by developers, boosting their productivity by 30 percent. With its Microsoft Virtualization solution, Brocade saved U.S.$1.96 million in hardware costs, improved server utilization by 75 percent, and reduced storage costs by 30 percent and electrical costs by 80 percent. IT staffers are managing the company’s infrastructure 20 percent more efficiently by using Microsoft System Center data center solutions.

SituationFounded in 1995, Brocade is a leading provider of high-performance networking solutions that help customers transition smoothly to a virtualized world in which programs and information reside anywhere. Brocade has built its competitive advantage through expertise, innovation, and new technology development with open standards leadership and strategic partnerships with the world’s leading IT companies. The company has 90 global offices and six data centers, three in the United States and one each in Munich, Germany; Bengaluru (Bangalore), India; and Singapore.

Brocade is in the business of helping its customers make the most out of their technology investments through solutions built for consolidation, network convergence, virtualization, and cloud computing. The company’s IT department focuses on the same goal internally, working to drive efficiencies and lower costs throughout the production environment. However, performance and reliability issues with the company’s existing virtualization solution and the corporate acquisition in January 2007 of McData, a fiber channel network equipment manufacturer, prompted a reevaluation of the company’s virtualization strategies.

“When we acquired McData, we doubled in size and inherited a large IT infrastructure with diverse virtualization technologies, including Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 and Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 virtualization technologies,” says Troy Foo, Manager of the Windows Engineering Team at Brocade. “We installed a few aging applications on

Virtual Server 2005, and our engineers began using Virtual PC 2007 in the engineering labs and for training sessions. Our field engineers started loading it onto their laptops to quickly provision and decommission test use-case scenarios in the field. This first introduction to Microsoft Virtualization technologies got us interested in the possibility of an alternative virtualization solution.”

Performance Issues At the time of the McData acquisition, IT staffers at Brocade were already facing challenges with the company’s five-node server cluster that hosted its virtualized environment. In addition to some Linux-based programs, the cluster hosted 70 virtual machines running the Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition operating systems and a variety of business-critical and heavily used programs in both the development and production environments. These included the Automated Data Processing (ADP) application for online payroll, an offshore product development solution from Mantra Technologies, the entire web development environment, the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 development environment, and an engineering information database.

“We had performance issues where some of the Windows-based applications hosted on the cluster were shutting down,” says Foo.

In early 2008, when Microsoft released the Windows Server 2008 operating system with Hyper-V virtualization technology, Brocade had already been working in the lab with the beta version. The company

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began evaluating the product, with its built-in virtualization technology. Hyper-V is a thin, micro-kernalized hypervisor-based virtualization technology that enables applications to run in their own virtual machines so that they can coexist on the same physical server. Also, Microsoft is a Technology Alliance Partner with Brocade, and Brocade’s developers were building virtualization solutions that interoperate with a Hyper-V environment. “On the first day I joined Brocade, I heard from developers in the lab who said, ‘Hey you should be looking at using Hyper-V in the production environment,’” recalls Doug Lind, Lead Windows Architect at Brocade. “They wanted us to be able to say we were using Hyper-V with our own products.”

Incentives for VirtualizationHowever, Lind needed convincing that the Microsoft Virtualization solution would be robust enough to handle the workloads already in the virtualized environment, let alone solve some of the other IT and business issues that Lind planned to solve with virtualization. There were still legacy programs running on Virtual Server 2005. There were overcrowded data centers at global offices, with increasingly large instances of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 messaging and collaboration software. There were 20 outdated servers at the Minnesota data center that were running Siebel software on the Windows 2000 Server operating system. There was an influx of extra hardware from another corporate acquisition in July 2008 of Foundry Networks, a networking hardware manufacturer. There was a plan to consolidate the four data centers in the United States down to one. Additionally, the 35 servers running Citrix applications

needed replacing, but the cost of new servers at U.S.$4,000 each seemed overly expensive for workloads that only required moderate processing power and memory resources.

Finally, development challenges at the company’s Bengaluru facility pointed to the need for a desktop virtualization solution. “This business case came at us slowly but ended up becoming a big problem,” says Lind. “Developers were experiencing significant latency transferring code across the local network to the data center in India. It could take an hour to transfer a gigabyte of data and then check in their code. It was getting to be a productivity killer.”

Faced with many reasons to expand the company’s virtualized environments, Brocade IT staffers had to make a decision: either upgrade and expand the existing solution, or switch to a Microsoft Virtualization solution.

SolutionLind and his team asked to see what the developers in the lab had been doing with Hyper-V. After sharing performance metrics and use-case scenarios from the lab, the group was impressed enough to put together a small proof-of-concept to demonstrate to the rest of the Windows team. Lind’s team used Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to migrate virtual machines from the original cluster to a single server running Hyper-V.

“Some IT staffers were a little concerned about moving the applications over, but when they saw how easy it was with the four-click migration wizard in Virtual

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Machine Manager 2008, they were reassured,” says Lind. “And we were all so impressed with the application performance improvements. At this time, the new Nehalem-class processers were coming out, and if you do your homework and match them up with Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V, the system flies.”

It was one thing for Hyper-V to impress the IT staffers, but Lind wanted to hear from the application owners before he made a decision. He and his team demonstrated a few of the programs running in the Hyper-V environment for business users. “The whole thing came down to the people who use these applications on a daily basis,” he recalls. “They all said, ‘Wow, this works better than before, we’ll keep it!’”

There were other reasons for migrating to a Microsoft Virtualization solution. Microsoft offered an economical licensing program with Windows Server 2008 Datacenter. “With Windows Server 2008 Datacenter, we were able to run an unlimited number of virtualized instances of Windows Server without purchasing additional licenses,” says Lind.

A New Platform for the Production EnvironmentOver the next six months, Brocade built its first Hyper-V cluster to run programs for Windows in the production environment. The IT team migrated the programs with the worst performance first, including the ADP payroll system and the Mantra Technologies solution. “These applications weren’t delivering the service levels the business expected,” says Foo. “Eventually, we migrated all 70 virtual machines running Windows-based applications from the

original virtualized environment into the Hyper-V environment.”

By the time Microsoft released Windows Server 2008 R2 in October 2009, Brocade had 30 percent of its production workload running on a Microsoft technology–based virtualized environment in all three of its U.S. data centers. The company immediately upgraded to Windows Server 2008 R2 to take advantage of new virtualization technologies, such as Hyper-V Live Migration and Cluster Shared Volumes, the latter of which allows multiple hosts to access the same shared logical unit number to provide optimal network load balancing within a cluster.

Lind and his team were particularly enthusiastic about the improved performance of dynamic virtual hard disks (VHDs) in the latest release of Hyper-V. This type of VHD uses only as much space on the backup as needed to store the data that the virtual disk currently contains. “When we did our internal benchmarks—testing performance with a fixed VHD, a dynamic VHD, and a pass-through scenario—there was a negligible difference in performance,” recalls Lind. “Pre [Windows Server 2008] R2, there was a 20 percent lag in performance with dynamic VHDs.”

With the release of Windows Server 2008 R2, Brocade turned its attention to the Minnesota data center and virtualized its entire Siebel environment, consolidating 20 outdated servers down to four Hyper-V hosts. Then, Brocade began a major server consolidation project in conjunction with building a new state-of-the-art data center in San Jose. “We turned to Hyper-V to virtualize all the legacy applications from

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“The biggest SQL Server database we have virtualized is our data warehouse for System Center products. It’s approaching 400 gigabytes, and the performance is fantastic.”

Doug Lind, Lead Windows Architect, Brocade

Foundry and a further 160 physical servers in our three data centers. We got everything to run on 16 HP blade servers in San Jose,” says Foo.

Virtualization across the Globe Next, Brocade began expanding its Microsoft Virtualization solution to address server sprawl and space constraints at global offices where there were more than 25 employees. The IT team named the project “Office in a Box” and virtualized the server running the domain controller and all other servers running business applications to run on a single host running Hyper-V.

“We had great success at our Munich center, where we consolidated four racks down to one, greatly reducing our physical footprint,” says Foo. “At Munich, we are virtualizing the Exchange 2007 Client Access server role and the Hub Transport server role in 2011 to reduce our physical footprint further and save on licensing costs. We see, on average, 2.5 million email messages a week and within the Munich footprint, around 20,000 messages a week.”

Brocade also virtualized 35 Citrix servers throughout its global infrastructure and its entire virtual private network (VPN) solution. “We have also virtualized parts of our production Office SharePoint Server 2007 environment, which gets 3 million hits a day and sits on top of a 160-gigabyte [Microsoft] SQL Server 2008 database,” adds Lind. “We are getting ready to upgrade to Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and have deployed the majority of the development environment on virtual servers and performance looks good. The biggest SQL Server database we have

virtualized is our data warehouse for System Center products. It’s approaching 400 gigabytes, and the performance is fantastic.”

To solve the latency issues that developers in Bengaluru were experiencing, Brocade turned to Microsoft Virtualization technologies to create a session virtualization scenario using Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2008 R2. Brocade IT staffers created virtual desktops running the Windows XP SP3 operating system for each developer and stored them in the central data center in San Jose. With Remote Desktop Services, developers can access their full desktop and work as they normally would, while only sending screen images, keystrokes, mouse movements, and each session’s discrete data back and forth to the server, thus solving the latency issue.

“Now with the virtual Windows XP desktops, developers can compile their code as they normally would. But when it’s time to check in, they don’t have to transfer the whole file anymore,” says Lind. “And it’s a lot quicker for us to provision a virtual Windows XP machine at headquarters than ship a new laptop to someone in India, the way we did before.”

Integrated Server and Desktop ManagementTo manage its physical and virtual servers and desktops, Brocade is taking advantage of Microsoft System Center data center solutions. The company uses Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 for host configuration, virtual machine creation, and to store and manage libraries of virtual machines. IT staffers are

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“Virtualization has made everyone in our office more productive, thanks to the manageability and ease of use of Microsoft technologies. Among the Windows IT staffers, we are seeing at least a 15 to 20 percent productivity gain.”

Doug Lind, Lead Windows Architect, Brocade

using Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 to monitor the health and performance of physical and virtual workloads, and Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2 to deploy programs, such as Microsoft Forefront Client Security, program upgrades, and security updates to all desktops.

Today, Brocade has 55 hosts with 445 virtual servers running Windows Server 2003 and 2008 and 275 virtual desktops running Windows XP SP3 worldwide. The company plans to upgrade to the Windows 7 operating system in late 2011.

BenefitsFour years ago, Brocade decided not to virtualize additional Windows-based servers on its original virtualization solution. Since then, the company has used a Microsoft Virtualization solution to help optimize its infrastructure—from the data center to the desktop. In the process, Brocade has saved millions of dollars in IT costs, improved server utilization, increased application reliability, improved employee productivity, and enabled the IT department to better serve the needs of the business.

Reduced CostsWith Hyper-V, Brocade has significantly reduced hardware costs through major server consolidation projects. Virtualization relieved the company of the burden of upgrading infrastructure inherited from corporate acquisitions, and it reduced the financial impact of hardware refresh cycles. “With 445 virtualized servers, we are saving $1.675 million in server replacement costs and with 275 virtualized desktops, about $277,000 for a total hardware cost

avoidance of $1.96 million,” says Lind. “We’ve reduced electrical costs by 80 percent, and with the improved performance of dynamic VHDs and Cluster Shared Volumes we have reduced data storage costs by 30 percent.”

Improved Server Utilization, Application Performance The more virtual applications that run on a single physical host, the better value Brocade gets out of its hardware investments. Compared to an average server-to-virtual machine ratio of 6 to 1 with the previous virtualization solution, Brocade IT staffers report an average of 18 to 1 with the Microsoft Virtualization solution—an increase of 75 percent in server utilization.

And those applications are more reliable and perform better. “With some applications, users saw a 20 percent increase in performance just logging on and running typical software commands,” says Foo. “When we were doing benchmarks in the lab it was about a 30 percent improvement across the board between applications running in the legacy virtualized environment and applications running in the Hyper-V environment,” adds Lind. “And with the Siebel application, performance went from 85 percent availability rate to 99.9 percent. Our users were ecstatic.”Increased Employee ProductivityIT staffers are saving many hundreds of hours on routine server and desktop administrative tasks as a result of the System Center and Microsoft Virtualization solution at Brocade. “Virtualization has made everyone in our office more productive, thanks to the manageability

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and ease of use of Microsoft technologies,” says Lind. “Among the Windows IT staffers, we are seeing at least a 15 to 20 percent productivity gain.”

Adds Foo, “We saved more than 700 hours by using System Center Configuration Manager to replace our Trend Micro antivirus solution with Microsoft Forefront Client Security to all 7,000 desktops, and we got the job done in a few months. To compare, before we had Configuration Manager, when we migrated from McAfee to Trend, it took us three years to get all the PCs up-to-date.”

Now that the developers in Bengaluru are no longer contending with latency issues on the network, Foo estimates a 40 percent improvement in their productivity, which contributes to reduced development cycles and increased business agility. The desktop virtualization solution has become so popular that Brocade tripled the number of virtual desktops in 16 months. “The developers are so happy to have their own work environments,” says Foo. “And in IT, we’re glad that their productivity is no longer constrained by an IT issue.”

Enabled IT to Better Support the BusinessBy using System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to administer the library of virtual Windows XP desktops and to quickly provision new virtual machines for developers, Lind and his team are enjoying a newfound ability to quickly comply with the needs of the business. “With Virtual Machine Manager, when we get a request for a new Windows XP machine for a project, we can have it ready for use in seven minutes,” says Lind. “Now we are

enabling rapid, agile development cycles instead of hindering them. The global server consolidation and streamlined management capabilities we gain with our Microsoft Virtualization solution contribute to a dynamic infrastructure for growing Brocade’s business.”

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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 Brocade products and services, call (408) 333-8000 or visit the website at: www.brocade.com

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 R2− Microsoft System Center Operations

Manager 2007 R2− Microsoft System Center Virtual

Machine Manager 2008 R2

Microsoft Forefront− Microsoft Forefront Client Security

Technologies− Hyper-V− Windows Server Remote Desktop

Services

Hardware Servers: Hewlett Packard DL 490