SAN JOSÉ STATE UNIVERSIT Y
CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY
San José State University’s Virtual Infrastructure Ensures
Availability of Computing Resources Even With Budget Cuts
School Buys VMware Software, Cuts Maintenance on Old, Obsolete Hardware and Gains
$60,000 in IT Budget
R E S U LT S
• Drove costs down from
$5,000-$6,000 per server to
about $1,000 per server
• Reduced server deployment
time from four months to less
than a week
• Increased system stability
by working within virtual
machines instead of working
directly on hardware
• Improved disaster recovery; can
now restore systems on any type
of hardware
• Repurposed underutilized server
farm with VMware virtualization
software to ensure computing
resources during budget cuts
• Optimized server management
capabilities using VirtualCenter
and VMotion
School Seeks Best IT Resources But
Needs to Stay Within Budget
San José State University (SJSU) is part of the
country’s largest four-year university system with 23
campuses located throughout the state of California.
SJSU serves 30,000 students and grants bachelor’s
and master’s degrees in 134 areas of study, striving
to give its students the resources they need for a
high quality, comprehensive education.
Managing the university’s datacenter was becoming a challenge as the space became crowded with
underutilized and expensive to maintain servers.
“As a university facing possible budget cuts, it was
crucial to drive down our costs,” says Victor Van Leer,
IT manager for SJSU. “Many servers were not verywell utilized, but they still took up space, heated
the environment, needed maintenance, and would
become obsolete in five years.”
Server deployment was also a nightmare. For
example, students forming a club often had to wait
four or five months for a supporting server to be
procured and deployed. “It was a long process. We
had to go through purchasing, order a server, wait
for delivery, fill out a request to get it racked, fill out
another request to get it cabled, and then a request
to get the operating system,” Van Leer says.
Updating servers was also difficult because applications and operating systems were tied to hardware.
“If we needed to change a system, we had to find
compatible hardware, which was difficult for many
of the servers.”
The IT staff began to look at other options.
When Van Leer read an article about VMware and
its virtualization technology, he was intrigued. “I
started reading about migrating physical machines
to virtual machines,” he says. “The idea of virtualizing a production server was appealing. I saw that
only VMware does this, read some case studies, and
decided to approve a pilot.” Vincent Alberico, a
senior technology specialist, was selected to head
up SJSU’s ESX pilot.
The Move to Virtual Infrastructure
Some of the IT staff were worried about the singlepoint-of-failure created by turning physical servers
into virtual machines and putting them onto a
single physical server. “There was some apprehension about running things in virtual machines,”
Alberico says. “It can take a while for people to feel
comfortable because they will think about losing
five or six machines if a server fails.”
Alberico says it was easy to allay these fears after
a successful evaluation phase, which started in
February 2004. Alberico was able to run six virtual
machines on one physical server with VMware
ESX Server. “The VMware software is really solid.
The virtual machines ran for over 100 days with no
hiccups,” he says. “I’d pause the machines and add
memory and network cards to them, and then I’d
start them back up. It worked seamlessly. Those
are things you wouldn’t be able to do without
virtualization.”
“If you turn servers that you have today into hardware that supports multiple
instances of virtual machines, and maybe order some more memory, then
you’ve set yourself up to continue adding servers, even if there comes at
time when you don’t have budget.”
Vincent Alberico
Systems Engineer
San Jose State University
SAN JOSÉ STATE UNIVERSIT Y
CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY
VMWARE VIRTUAL
INFRASTRUCTURE
AT W O R K
• ESX Server Licenses on 2-CPU
Dell 2650 Servers with 2-4 GB
RAM each
• Using VirtualCenter with ESX and
Virtual SMP
• Guest operating systems include:
Windows Server 2003, Linux Red
Hat Fedora Core
• Production applications running
in virtual machines include:
Internet Information Server, File
and Print Services
Alberico and his group bought the license for his
evaluation machine, and then expanded into a
full virtual infrastructure. SJSU now has six ESX
Server licenses which are managed using VMware
VirtualCenter. The team also purchased Virtual SMP
to run CPU intensive applications that benefit from
dual processor capability and VMotion technology
to enable no-downtime maintenance of hardware.
Faster, Better Results With
Virtualization
Before finding VMware software, SJSU had invested
in a Linux virtualization for its mainframe computer,
but the IT group was unhappy with its performance
and high cost. Maintenance alone cost the school
$60,000 a year. Instead of paying the maintenance
fee, Alberico’s team put the money toward the purchase of servers and virtualization software.
Now, they still have $30,000, and have built a strong
virtual infrastructure ready to host more virtual
machines in coming years at no additional cost. The
benefits of virtual infrastructure to the department
and the school include:
• Staying ahead of budget. SJSU has realized
major cost savings while building a virtual
infrastructure that will accommodate IT over the
next few years. “By canceling our mainframe
support, we’ve paid for our resources and are
ahead $30,000 for the year," says Alberico. "For next
year, it’s free because we already have everything
set up. We can add more nodes to our ESX environment every year and it will still cost less than
maintenance on the mainframe.”
• Cost savings for servers. The IT department
runs six virtual machines on each physical server.
Fully burdened physical servers cost SJSU $5,000$6,000 each. Alberico estimates the cost of virtual
machines at $1,000 each, providing a $4,000
savings for each virtual machine deployed.
• Faster server deployment. Instead of taking four
or five months to provision a new server, the IT
staff can completely set up a server within a week,
which Alberico says is fast for a university. “The
amount of time it takes to get a server in a university environment is huge because you have to
go through many groups to get a physical server
added," he says. "Basically, you cut out those steps
with VMware software. Our sysadmins can grab a
canned image, maybe a sys prep image, and it’s
basically ready to be deployed.”
• System stability. Because people are working in
virtual machines instead of working directly on a
physical server, there’s less chance that physical
machines will be accidentally damaged or fail
because of user error. “Before using VMware software, we had a lot of people coming into the data
center to work on their servers, and they were
bumping cables and things like that,” says Alberico.
“With VMware software, you can’t do anything to
the hardware because you work on the virtual
machine console remotely.”
• Disaster recovery. SJSU uses a Tivoli client to
back up its virtual machines. When there are
system changes, the IT team copies the virtual
hard disk and keeps it offline. “We used to use
ghost images for disaster recovery," Alberico says.
"If a system crashed, we could use ghost to restore
the system, install current patches and get it back
online quickly, but you had to restore it on the
same hardware as the original machine. With ESX
Server, we don’t need to do imaging because we
have the image backups, and we can restore the
system on any ESX server.”
• Optimal server management capabilities. With
VirtualCenter and VMotion, the IT team can manage its virtual machines from a centralized point,
allocating them to hardware and reallocating
CPU, RAM, disk, and network resources for maximum performance. “It saves us a lot of hassle, and
we can get the most out of our resources,” says
Alberico.
SAN JOSÉ STATE UNIVERSIT Y
CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY
Increased Flexibility and Productivity
With the virtual infrastructure in place, SJSU’s IT
department is able to accommodate needs of faculty and staff without worrying about the expense of
ordering hardware, and staying within their budget.
Alberico says another advantage is the ability to
do more scenario testing. “We can set up a virtual
network of machines on private network interfaces
or virtual switches so we can model and test systems with minimal hardware resources,” he says. “If
we want a server product to be evaluated by end
users, we give them a virtual machine to do their
testing on. That way they’re running in a production
environment, and it’s inherently more available than
running it on the desktop type machine.”
Alberico adds that the software saves the IT staff
from dealing with switches and wiring because of
ESX Server’s VLAN support. “If we run a switched
network, like Cisco Systems, we can host multiple
networks on a single piece of copper by using
802.3q tagging,” he says. “We can place a virtual
machine on a specific network without having to
make a cabling request.”
Migrating Servers Now Gets SJSU
Ready for the Future
One of SJSU’s first virtual infrastructure projects
was migrating its Microsoft Active Directory Web
portal servers into virtual machines. Without
VMware software, the school would have had to
purchase a lot more servers. “Web servers are the
most common type of virtual machine deployed
currently, but we hope to deploy all types of servers within the virtual infrastructure in the future,”
Alberico explains. “We plan to use VMware’s professional services to assist us with physical to virtual
migrations to help retire legacy servers. Virtualization
technology from VMware allows us flexibility to easily keep our physical servers up to date because the
virtual machine exposes a standard virtualized set of
hardware to the guest operating system no matter
what the underlying physical server happens to be.
The college was also able to reuse existing hardware,
migrating systems on underutilized servers onto
virtual machines so they could repurpose the servers
for other projects. “Servers using five or ten percent
of their CPU cycles got turned into virtual machines.”
Alberico says the virtual infrastructure strategy is
a cost effective way to create a scalable platform
because most companies have already invested
in hardware, or they know they will need to buy
hardware. “You might want to buy more RAM, and
then an ESX Server license costs about half what
you’d pay for another server. As soon as you’ve
set up two virtual machines on the server, you’ve
covered your costs. The third and fourth virtual
machines are ‘free,’ so to speak. It’s basically a very
small cost to add servers after the initial investment.”
With virtual infrastructure from VMware, SJSU has
a platform that will scale and enable it to provide
services to its users, even if faced with budget
cuts. “If you turn servers that you have today into
hardware that supports multiple instances of virtual
machines, and maybe increase their RAM, then
you’ve set yourself up to continue adding servers,
even if there comes at time when you don’t have
budget,” Alberico says.
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