going beyond virtualisation: how coventry university modernised their management platform and saved...

Going Beyond Virtualisation:How Coventry University modernised their management platform and saved money with Microsoft System Centre 2012

Steve Rogers– Server Team Leader

14th March 2013

What’s all this noise?Business Drivers & Challenges

Cost Savings and Improved Services

Introduction

System Center 2012 Suite & The Power of One

The Future, Gotcha’s & Take Away

Introduction

Coventry is an evolving and innovative university with a growing reputation

for excellence in education.

Independent surveys show that we provide a caring and

supportive environment, enriched by a unique blend

of academic expertise and practical experience.

Three words set us apart - employability, enterprise

and entrepreneurship.

Our aim is to keep on improving. We're investing heavily in developing our

state-of-the-art facilities with £160m earmarked for

improvements over the next ten years.

And by seeking to enhance the strong vocational

emphasis of our courses and bolstering our links with

the very best industry organisations, we're firmly

focussed on preparing students for successful

futures.

About Coventry University I.T

• On-Premise Private Cloud

• 250+ Servers and 2,500 Desktops

• Over 50 Core Services

• 80% Virtualised on Hyper-V (Windows 2008R2 and 2012)

• 3 Datacentres spread across campus (and a new one offsite coming soon)

• Public Cloud (Office 365 for Students, Main Marketing Website and Storage)

Introduction

Business Drivers & Challenges

Cost Savings Across I.T• Focussed on delivering our 2010-2015 Corporate

Plan• IT Work Package aimed at centralising,

standardising and realising £1,000,000 efficiency savings and £500,000 in staff savings across I.T

IT Centralisation & Restructure• All localised IT support now under a single, central

service

Tighter Business Focus• Previously seen as an IT initiative; now seen as a

business initiative

Business Context

Business Drivers & Challenges

Multiple Management and Monitoring Tools Used Across I.T

What’s all this noise?

Too Much Information!• Multiple individual systems to contend with and

configure with no awareness of other tools.

• 1000’s of emails and alerts from monitoring tools per hour – far too many for staff to deal with

• Several Desktop Management Tools – causing desktop image and setting corruption and conflicts

• Jumping between multiple infrastructure tools to manage numerous virtual machine platforms and hosts

• No detailed information on the system error alerts causing many issues to be simply ignored

• All of these tools were extremely exhaustive on staff resource and time especially when team numbers had just been reduced.

Desktop to Datacentre

Applications & State

Operating Costs

Shared Departmental Goals

Incident & JobsITIL/MOF Processes

Informative Alerts

What’s all this noise?

Something had to change!

Resource

We needed a single suite of tools aligned to our goals

Product Comparison & Consolidation



• App Controller • Operations Manager • Orchestrator • Service Manager • Virtual Machine Manager • Data Protection Manager • Endpoint Protection • Configuration Manager

Central Admin Console for Sys Admin

Agent and Agentless Monitoring in Real-Time (Servers, Networks, Workstations and any SNMP device)

Application Awareness and Health Monitors

Centralised Monitoring and Management

Audit Collection Services (We’re watching you)

Free Management Packs from Microsoft and Vendors

Integrate existing monitoring via connectors



VM Host Management – Hyper-V, VMware & CITRIX

On-Premise and Cloud Based Management

Centralised Monitoring and Management of VM’s

Resource Management and Dynamic Optimization

High Speed Service and Server Deployments

Conversion Tool set P2V, V2V and Service Deployment



A standardised Service Tool used across all of I.T

Self-Service Portal and Automated Ticket System

Incident, Change, Problem, configuration and release management built-in around the ITIL and MOF frameworks

Improved Responsiveness and Reduced Support Costs

Provided multiple ways to raise a support ticket with our Service Desk



Centrally deploy O/S’s, Applications, and updates

Monitor and manage licensing for compliance

Central Hardware and Software Inventory

Rich Remote Admin for All Campus Computers

Central Power Management and Wake up technology (293 ton saving in Carbon)



Roles Previous Products Replaced with System Center

Savings on products P/A

Server and networkMonitoring

Solar winds, Nagios, Zabbix, HP Insight, IBM Director utilities

Operations Manager 2012 SP1

£25,000

Virtual Machine Management

VMware Infrastructure, SCVMM 2008 R2

Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1

£8,000

Service Desk Tool RMS Service Manager 2010 – Currently Migrating to 2012 SP1

£30,000

Desktop management (2,500 PC’s)

Altiris, SMS 2005 System Center 2007 R3 - Currently Migrating to 2012 SP1

£18,000 on product£28,000 on carbon reduction and PC power management

Total Cost for our System Center under Academic VL exc SQL

£892.20 Total Savings Per Annum

£109,000

Cost Savings & Benefits

Gotcha’s & Take Away

Gotcha’s and Lessons Learnt – With all this good there has to be some bad

• System Center (especially SCOM) has a sandbox feel to it by design and still requires a lot of configuration to make it work for you.

• Tackle one set of systems at a time and filter out the noise and

tweak those alerts for your environment – its worth it in the end!

• Sometimes the way you run your systems through third party products etc. are not always in line with Microsoft or other vendor best practices. Some rules can be modified but some are part of the product or pre-configured management packs.

• Linux support on SCVMM is still geared towards the main distributions such as Red Hat and Centos.

• System Center has a wide range of supported product connectors. You might be able to simply import your existing tools into your System Center interface to smooth the transition. Remember you don’t have to use all of the System Center tools immediately.

• Power Management through Configuration manager does affect the desktop experience to reduce power usage. Notify your users of the benefits of power saving and profile your users well in advance and why you put those machines in standby when not in use.

Meaningful Alerts and Automated Resolution

Minimal Skillsets and Resource Required

Gain Control of everything centrally

Desktop to Datacenter

Centralised Management for All Systems


Take Aways

Help users to help themselves

All Products working together

Assess Conformity

Automation

Q&A

[email protected] Team Leader

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