going beyond virtualisation: how coventry university modernised their management platform and saved...
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Microsoft System Centre 2012 provides an integrated management platform with a robust set of capabilities. Coventry are currently using Systems Centre Virtual Machine Manager, Operations Manager, Service Manager and Configuration Manager. Come and learn how they have successfully integrated these management tools and saved money in the process.TRANSCRIPT
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
System Center 2012 Suite & The Power of One
System Center 2012 Suite & The Power of One
• 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
System Center 2012 Suite & The Power of One
Central Admin Console for Sys Admin
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
System Center 2012 Suite & The Power of One
Central Admin Console for Sys Admin
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
System Center 2012 Suite & The Power of One
Central Admin Console for Sys Admin
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)
System Center 2012 Suite & The Power of One
Cost Savings and Improved Services
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
Cost Savings and Improved Services
Take Aways
Help users to help themselves
All Products working together
Assess Conformity
Automation
Q&A
[email protected] Team Leader