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Chino Valley Unified School District
“For me virtualization is a no brainer, really, any company that has an IT department has an IT budget, and it is an absolute shame to waste any part of that budget which is what will happen if virtualization is not considered” — G eorges Khairallah, Network Specialist, Chino Valley Unified School District K E Y H I G H L I G H TS Challenge A school district’s heterogeneous and aging infrastructure was exposing it to increased risks of outages within its business critical application environment and overtaxing its lean IT staff.
Solution Implement virtualization technology in key areas of the district infrastructure, including its server environment as well as key desktop deployments. • 611 virtual machines including 450 linked clones • Virtual desktops deployed with VMware View • Application incompatibility resolved using VMware ThinApp • VMware vSphere deployed at each of the district’s 35 facilities • Entire Student Information System is virtualized, including servers and desktops
Results • Saved $20,000 in Server maintenance costs • Number of servers reduced by 50 percent • Student information system more secure •Virtualized desktops faster • Reduced risk that viruses, spyware will infect district network • Student labs can be rebuilt in minutes, instead of 40-60 person-hours
Chino Valley Unified School District modernizes with virtualized solutions “More with less” is finally getting easier: Server fleet reduced by half; virtualized student information system now fast-loading and secure; labs can be rebuilt in seconds instead of hours. Running a large school district is an incredible operational challenge. Running a large school district that also ranks high academically is an incredible achievement. That’s what Chino Valley Unified School District has done. There are over 32,000 students enrolled at Chino, making it one of the 200 largest of the United States’ 14,000 school districts. And academically, Chino is the highest ranked district in the densely populated San Bernardino County northeast of Los Angeles. It helps that Chino has an IT organization that is focused on maximizing the value of the district’s IT budget and delivering high quality technology services to teachers, staff and students. One way it does that is by leveraging virtualization technology from VMware.
Needed: a simpler, more manageable infrastructure Chino’s push to virtualize became a driving focus when Georges Khairallah, Network Specialist, joined the district several years ago. Hired initially to manage a Citrix deployment, Khairallah noticed some serious issues with Chino’s broader technology infrastructure. The environment had been implemented piecemeal, and staff was more focused on solving the tactical problems in each location. Multiply that times 34 facilities in three cities, and the result was a heterogeneous, disparate, patched-together environment that lacked a cohesive, consistent foundation. For Khairallah, the issue was clear. Chino needed to simplify the environment. And it needed technology that would make the infrastructure easier and less time-consuming to manage. At the time, Khairallah had limited hands-on experience with VMware technology, but he did have a solid conceptual understanding of it—enough to know that virtualization could sort out Chino’s infrastructure. So little by little, he began implementing a VMware environment. “I started with some of our older servers,” he says. “Some were completely inadequate from a hardware perspective, so I virtualized them.” This, in turn, allowed Khairallah to move the server’s applications onto other systems, and retire the old hardware. So Chino began allocating budget to virtualization technology, and Khairallah took responsibility for deploying VMware across the district. Today, every district facility’s servers run as VMware virtual hosts. Around 40 physical servers have been retired altogether, with another 12-15 scheduled to come offline in the near future. Altogether, that represents a 50 percent reduction in the district’s server fleet. “We recently omitted the renewal of about 20 servers which used to be physical servers, saving a renewal cost of about $20,000. Our data center power usage has been cut
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almost in half, based on the reports from our UPS load reports; this saves us in power costs, as well as potentially removing one of the UPS which also had an ongoing cost.
VMware vSphere 4
This means that not only are the power costs reduced, but maintenance costs are lower as well.
- VMware ESX and ESXi - Both Standard and Enterprise editions deployed
VMware View 4 - VMware View Manager
VMware ThinApp Deployment E n viro n ment Primary application • VMware vSphere 4, both Standard and Enterprise editions
Primary hardware • Dell PowerEdge 1900/1950/2900/2950 and R710 servers • Mixed physical and virtual desktop environment of 5500 desktops including custom-built machines, Dell OptiPlex desktops, and Wyse thin clients • Compellent SAN at the District Office EqualLogic SANs at other sites
Primary software • Microsoft Exchange2003 • Microsoft SQL 2000, 2005, and 2008 • Aeries Student Information System • HR document manager • Hundreds of lab applications such as Orchard Goldstar, ST Math, Fast Forword and Read 180 • Other applications including domain controllers, Locksmith Software keying application, Track-It! Helpdesk System, IIS 6 & 7 web servers, and Blackberry Enterprise server , UMRA server and print servers
“Having a VMware infrastructure with vMotion and built in redundancy and failover in its architecture (redundant iSCSI, Fiber Channel, and storage), we got rid of redundant licensing costs for Microsoft clustering, and 2 SQL 2008 Enterprise licenses. This alone saves us close to $8500 in license fees. Server maintenance tasks, and restores back to snapshots are also so much simpler, saving us hours in maintenance costs, and frees us up to do more productive tasks.” Between VMware vCenter and View Manager, many hours are saved in bulk-updating lab workstations, without having to drive to the site locations, and it takes just a couple of minutes to initiate the task and a couple of hours to complete it. Khairallah also had his eye on other things besides Chino’s servers; he also needed a way to revamp critical pieces of the district’s desktop environment.
Super-fast performance, improved security Chino’s desktop infrastructure is, Khairallah says, “a big box of chocolates.” The district offices, classrooms, and labs are equipped with a couple of different brands, and dozens of models of computers, all covered by different pieces of the district budget, and all on different refresh cycles. Someday, the district may standardize the environment, but in the meantime, the focus has been modernizing selected pieces that were particularly troublesome. There were other problems with the implementation as well. The network mapping architecture was needlessly redundant. The infrastructure was a server hog—the old setup used 22 servers to support only 230 users. The district had fallen behind on its Citrix renewals, and catching up would have been prohibitively expensive. And the servers themselves were 10 years old. They were becoming increasingly unreliable, and had high support costs . Khairallah considered a number of different approaches to fixing the problem , and decided that VMware View technology was the best fit. “I proposed we test a VMware View implementation for our Aeries Student Information System,” he says. He also realized that he didn’t need to worry about hardware to run the pilot: he could create a VMware ThinApp package of the application .It would be lightweight enough to run on the existing thin clients alongside their other applications. So he deployed the View client to 50 staff. “They loved it,” Khairallah continues. “The performance was super-fast and it worked really well.” The success of the pilot won the district’s full support, and Khairallah moved the entire office onto a VMware View infrastructure. The implementation has since proved to be highly secure—which is critical to protecting student privacy. “The virtual machines are completely isolated,” Khairallah explains. “We can control exactly how they function and who can access them, and we can clean them out any time we need to.” Behind the scenes, Khairallah has also virtualized the office’s server environment, replacing its 19 old servers with an eight-server cluster running a VMware vSphere environment. This environment now runs all of the district’s critical enterprise applications, including Microsoft Exchange (3000 mailboxes altogether), Microsoft SQL, 38 domain controllers, and the Aeries application.
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“The return on investment with VMware virtualization technology is truly significant. If you do the math, if you consider the time you save, the person-hours alone, you’ll realize that it’s a waste to invest any part of your IT budget on anything else. You have to virtualize first.” — G eorges Khairallah, Network Specialist, Chino Valley Unified School District
Rebuilding student labs in seconds, instead of days With the district office project complete, Khairallah turned his attention to another area sorely in need of desktop virtualization: the district’s student labs. Each of Chino’s 50 labs is equipped with 30-40 computers; for the most part, these were originally deployed as standalone machines. Each lab runs some subset of the district’s hundreds of lab applications, depending on the grade level of the students using the lab and the classes taught there. Of all of the district’s desktop systems, the labs are the most time-consuming to support because they need to be rebuilt several times a year. Whenever teachers require changes to the lab software, for example, or the machines need patches or Windows updates, the machines have to be taken out of service and reconfigured. With physical workstations, this is an extremely time-consuming task. “Every time we needed to redeploy a new lab, it takes two or three technicians three- to-four days to get it done,” Khairallah says. To mitigate this, Khairallah is migrating the school’s labs onto a VMware View infrastructure as budget money becomes available. He’s been able to virtualize four labs this way to date, and the improvement in manageability is striking: the labs can now be rebuilt with the click of a button. “We joke about it,” Khairallah says. “I’ll say ‘I’m going to rebuild the lab now.’ A few minutes later, it’s done.” In addition, the virtualized labs are more secure. The risk of viruses or spyware infecting the district network is greatly reduced, for instance, because the virtualize desktops can be easily wiped out and re-created from a clean image.
A solution that stretches tight budgets As Khairallah looks to the future, he knows VMware virtualization will play an increasing role in Chino’s infrastructure. It’s an evolution he welcomes. Like many school systems today, Chino’s IT budget is extremely tight, and its IT staff is spread thin: Six technicians manage the district’s entire fleet of 5500 desktop computers; three other employees oversee the district’s networks, enterprise applications and servers. (Plus a helpdesk of 3 people who help users over the phone) The department keeps up with its workload, but only through sheer dedication and persistence. Virtualization promises to reduce the workload and pressure on the IT staff. This, in turn, will allow the staff to focus more proactively on maintaining the district’s infrastructure and applications services—services it needs to maintain its high academic standards. As Chino virtualizes more of its infrastructure, it will also accrue more cost savings. Khairallah estimates that the investment the district has made to date in VMware technology will pay for itself in about two years. Those savings will grow as virtualization further reduces the district’s power and cooling costs. And with deploying VMware View, the district will be able to extend the life cycle of its desktop systems; instead of deploying a full physical machine for 7 – 10 years and having an obsolete system at the end of that time, deploying a thin-client over a similar timeframe is expected to deliver a cutting edge system up till the last day of its use. Between the money saved and the improved manageability of the virtualized infrastructure, the technology is, for Khairallah, an obvious priority. “Once you see how many hours of time you save when you are running a virtualized environment, compared to conventional servers and desktops, it’s a no brainer,” Khairallah says. “VMware technology is where you should put your budget.”
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