CE ULSETC OO MM EM R UcNaI se T C A Tstu I O Nd y City of Alexandria, Louisiana City of Alexandria Virtualizes to Cut Costs, Save Time, Simplify Management C h alle n g e The City of Alexandria in Louisiana, under tight budgetary constraints, wished to decrease the cost of running its IT infrastructure, while improving manageability and making ongoing application upgrades to deliver excellent city services. s o lu t i o n Aided by CMA Technology Solutions, the city began with virtualizing its datacenter and then took things a step further by setting up a disaster recovery site and using Site Recovery Manager as the failover mechanism to provide maximum system availability. •Datacenter 90% virtualized and moving toward 100% •Desktop virtualization to extend to approximately 180 end users •Site Recovery Manager for automated datacenter failover to disaster recovery site •IT staff of 7 supports systems for 750 geographically dispersed employees using dozens of applications IT Staff of Seven Relies on VMware Technology to Provide Dozens of Applications to 750 End Users From firefighters to finance directors, employees of the City of Alexandria in Louisiana depend on the city’s IT department for the applications they need to do their jobs. Yet the IT department consists of just seven people, providing dozens of applications to 750 end users—on a budget so tight that three jobs remain unfilled. What makes it possible is virtualization. Alexandria started virtualizing in 2003, with the aid of VMware partner CMA Technology Solutions. Since then the city has virtualized 90 percent of its datacenter, including core Oracle applications. It aims now for 100 percent datacenter virtualization, as well as desktop virtualization and robust disaster recovery using VMware solutions. “Why did we virtualize? It was about money, time and manageability,” says Blake Rachal, Alexandria’s assistant director of IT. “We saw the value of getting rid of all these physical servers and virtualizing them—having one physical location with all the resources at our fingertips.” Virtualization with VMware technology is saving Alexandria some $300,000 a year in labor costs, Rachal says. Routine maintenance requires no interruption of service and no weekend overtime. Provisioning new applications has gone from a month-long headache to a 30-minute snap. “Our goal for the city of Alexandria was to develop back-end systems to make the organization run better, be easier to manage and cost less,” says Jonathan Peyton, IBM System x and storage specialist with CMA. “Virtualization with VMware technology is the key.” City Relies on IT Department for Vital Services vm wa r e at wo r k • VMware vSphere 4 • VMware vMotion • VMware High Availability • VMware Fault Tolerance • VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler • VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager RESULTS • Labor-cost avoidance of approximately $300,000 a year • New applications and upgrades deployed within hours instead of weeks, with no travel • Predictable and reliable site failover with Site Recovery Manager Technology Solutions Located along the Red River, the City of Alexandria is home to 46,000 people and serves as a premier port for the central Louisiana corridor. City operations are spread across 14 individual campuses. Vital services supported by the IT department include police, fire, public works, parks and recreation, wastewater treatment, and utilities, as well as business functions such as finance and legal services. Alexandria started working with CMA in 2002. An IBM Premier Business Partner that provides end-to-end technology solutions and services, CMA helped architect and deploy the city’s first virtualized infrastructure, as well as a recent upgrade. CMA also helps the city think strategically about technology possibilities for the future. “We lean on CMA quite a bit,” Rachal says. “When we put in storage area networks, for example, and when we put in blades, CMA is our solution partner. They’re professionals. They do it every day.” C U S T O M E R C a se S tu d y / 1 C U S T O M E R c a se stu d y Today, Alexandria’s VMware infrastructure consists of VMware vSphere® with VMware vCenter™ management, and a desktop virtualization pilot project running VMware View™. The vSphere platform includes key features delivering resilience, flexibility and dynamic agility. VMware vMotion® leverages virtualization of servers, storage and networking to move an entire running virtual machine instantaneously from one server to another. VMware High Availability (HA) and VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) decrease downtime and reduce risk. VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) dynamically allocates and balances computing resources. “We run the servers with Distributed Resource Scheduling enabled, so if one is overtasked it hands operations off to another that’s not working as hard,” Rachal says. “When we have to bring down a server for maintenance, it happens without end users even knowing—there’s no interruption of service. On the IT side, it’s not night work anymore; it’s not overtime.” The city’s IT systems run in a City Hall production datacenter and a Customer Service Center that also serves as a disaster recovery site. These datacenters use IBM servers and storage, with Microsoft® Windows and Linux operating systems. Before virtualizing, the city ran 28 physical rack mount servers and a mainframe. Today approximately 16 physical servers remain, in addition to four new IBM hosts. Most of the city’s 38 virtual machines run on two IBM servers at City Hall. “They have 8U worth of virtual machine hosts carrying workloads that would take at least two racks full of physical equipment,” CMA’s Peyton notes. “They save on equipment, space, power, pooling, and external infrastructure for fiber channel connections and network ports. A new 10-gigabit fiber network looping around the city will enable Alexandria to centralize even the most demanding applications in the main datacenter without compromising speed of service to end users. “Centralization is where it’s at for us,” Rachal says. “It just makes everything easier.” All of this is about delivering the applications that keep Alexandria running and its citizens safe. The IT department delivers some 30 virtualized applications, ranging from the core Oracle geographical information system (GIS) database—Oracle Spatial Network Data Model—to specialized applications used by just a handful of people. One application connects police patrol cars with databases, so officers can search information from their mobile laptops. Another helps the motor-pool department track vehicle maintenance. Yet other applications help run the city animal shelter and zoo. Alexandria’s virtualization of its GIS application demonstrates the feasibility and advantages of running a large, mission-critical Oracle database on VMware technology. The application runs on both an Oracle Web server and a database server, with 5 terabytes of images attached. Approximately 150 end users rely on the resource, including the planning director; engineering director; and all building, gas, water and electrical inspectors. The utility and engineering departments use the GIS system to mark underground utility lines, so they won’t be punctured during new construction. Ultimately, the application will tie into the property-tax system. “It will be a stem-to-stern deployment covering all aspects of public works,” Rachal says. “The Oracle GIS application is absolutely critical to a broad range of city functions—and it runs beautifully on VMware technology.” C U S T O M E R C a se S tu d y / 2 C U S T O M E R c a se stu d y Fast Provisioning Stuns Application Owners Application owners typically come to Rachal needing a new deployment “done yesterday.” In the past it took up to four weeks to order, purchase and deploy physical servers to handle a new application. Now it takes minutes to provision a new virtual machine. Recently the city director of utilities came in with a request for new utility software. “We called him the next day and said, ‘Mike, your server’s ready to go,’” Rachal recalls. “That was jaw-dropping to him.” “We have a golden template that we keep updated with the most current version of the server product, so we’re able to provision a server in less than 30 minutes,” he adds. “We create it and it’s done.” Building on the keen success of its datacenter virtualization, Alexandria now is moving toward desktop virtualization and automated disaster recovery. Virtual Desktop Pilot to Expand Alexandria started desktop virtualization with a VMware View pilot project involving 23 end users in a variety of employment settings. Ultimately virtualization will extend to some 180 desktops for utility department call-center personnel, warehouse staff, dataentry workers, secretaries and other city employees. View is a solution for delivering desktops as a simplified, automated managed service. The software allows Rachal and his staff to consolidate virtual desktops on datacenter servers and manage them from a single point of control. Application updates are centralized and automated. End users, meanwhile, gain a desktop experience that is rich, consistent, high-performance and personalized. “From the operating system to every application they need to do their jobs, employees’ virtual desktops are implemented according their organizational unit in Active Directory,” Rachal says. “There’s no build-up time whatsoever. My techs don’t have to go onsite every time there’s a problem. They don’t have to touch 180 individual PCs to provision new applications.” The city has chosen HP Mobile Thin Clients as its desktop hardware platform. With no hard drive, these devices deliver powerful cost and security advantages. They’re less expensive to purchase and maintain. If a unit fails, it can be replaced at low cost. If it is stolen, no data is at risk because all applications and data reside on servers at the back end. “It’s total desktop control,” Rachal says. “The end user’s profile is there and their system is built on the fly—any data or software they add during their session is erased from the system when they log off. They start with a fresh desktop every day. Everything’s running on this state-of-the-art, highly available, totally redundant storage back end in this virtual infrastructure. Not only are the liability and serviceability issues addressed, but also security in general.” Virtual Desktop Pilot to Expand Alexandria’s other key initiative is to strengthen its business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities. Because it is in a hurricane zone, robust disaster recovery is a must for Alexandria. The solution is VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to automate the recovery process, ensure successful recovery, and simplify management and testing of recovery plans. C U S T O M E R C a se S tu d y / 3 C U S T O M E R C a se S tu d y “SRM provides a step-by-step documentation of what it’s doing,” CMA’s Peyton says. “Doing this manually—failing over servers and storage to another location—could be pages and pages of steps, and if you miss one nothing works. SRM takes all the guesswork out of it, makes it easier. It’s a powerful, proven and supported solution. The addition of Site Recovery Manager has taken the city to an entirely new level of availability—VMware’s underlying virtualization layer is a key component of that business continuity tool.” “We saw the value of being able to get rid of the physical servers, virtualize the infrastructure and have one location that two people can manage. Through VMware vCenter, every server is at our fingertips. We don’t have to stand at a console at a datacenter across town. ” Blake Rachal Assistant Director of IT City of Alexandria, Louisiana Rachal notes that Alexandria’s ongoing infrastructure updates have created all the resources, such as fiber lines and storage replication, needed to implement Site Recovery Manager. “All we needed was the SRM licenses to get push-button failover to the disaster recovery site. We are now able to transport our entire main production environment from City Hall to our backup datacenter in minutes. A task such as this would have taken weeks of downtime in a physical environment and would have no doubt added data loss. We have had several outages in the past that could have been avoided had SRM been in place— now that the system is up and running, we feel much more secure about planned and unplanned downtime,” says Rachal. Alexandria is in the process of virtualizing its Microsoft® Exchange implementation. The city also is starting to provide e-citation capabilities for police officers to print traffic tickets right in their patrol cars. “Computers are the reason I come to work every day,” Rachal says. “Something that 20 years ago sounded impossible becomes a common business application. Virtualization isn’t some fantasy. It’s the technology of the future, here today.” D e p loymen t En vir on men t Primary Application VMware vSphere 4 Enterprise Primary Hardware Production: Two IBM x3850M2 4-way 6-core systems with 128GB RAM each, VS4 hosts; one IBM x3550 vCenter Server; one IBM DS5100 4Gbps Fiber Channel storage system with 28TB SATA and 14TB fiber channel disk. Customer Service Center/ disaster recovery: Two IBM x3850M2 four-way six-core systems with 128GB RAM each, VS4 hosts; IBM DS5100 4Gbps Fiber Channel storage system with 28TB SATA and 5TB Fiber Channel disk; the two IBM DS5100 storage systems have two-way mirrors over a direct fiber link between the two buildings; HP 4320t Mobile Thin Clients for virtualized desktops. Primary Software Virtualized Microsoft Exchange 2010 Operating Systems Microsoft® Windows, 2003 to 2008; Linux. Oracle Spatial Network Data Model DB-GIS; Avaya call accounting; BlackBerry Enterprise Server; ACS FIREHOUSE Software; North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) utility software; ADSI Court Management; Numara Track-It! workorder processing; NetMotion Wireless patrol car software; GeoManage Software, property tax solution; Microsoft® Active Directory; Microsoft SQL Server; also software for animal shelter management, golf pro shop, domain controllers, file servers. More than 30 applications, 750 end users Technology Solutions VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com Copyright © 2011 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at http://www.vmware.com/go/patents. VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies. Item No: VMW-CS-Alexandria-USLET