Microsoft Virtualization: Data Center to DesktopCustomer Solution Case Study

Regulator Speeds Server Provisioning by 300 Percent, Boosts Uptime via Virtualization

OverviewCountry or Region: CanadaIndustry: Professional services—Real estate industry

Customer ProfileTarion Warranty Corporation protects the rights of new home buyers and regulates new home builders in the Canadian province of Ontario. Based in Toronto, Tarion has about 250 employees.

Business SituationTarion wanted to extend its virtual environment, simplify management, and accelerate disaster recovery.

SolutionThe company switched from VMware to the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system with Hyper-V technology and Microsoft System Center data center solutions.

Benefits Reduced provisioning time by 75

percent, eased troubleshooting Boosted uptime by 27 percent, saved

U.S.$208,000 every refresh cycle Enabled more efficient disaster

recovery

“By using Microsoft, we expanded our virtualized environment beyond what was possible with VMware, made it much easier to manage, and improved customer service. We can scale our business without worry.”

Frank Ferlaino, Manager, Infrastructure and Applications, Tarion Warranty Corporation

Tarion Warranty Corporation regulates the new home building industry in the Canadian province of Ontario and is relied on by homeowners, buyers, and builders to process warranties and claims quickly and accurately. When growth resulted in a data center that overheated and experienced shutdowns, Tarion used VMware to consolidate servers. However, the technology was difficult to manage, and Tarion limited its use. By switching to the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system with Hyper-V technology and Microsoft System Center data center solutions, Tarion deployed servers 300 percent faster and pinpointed issues 500 percent faster than with VMware. It extended virtualization to disaster recovery, reducing recovery time by 25 percent, and optimized uptime, improving service for builders, homeowners, and employees. Tarion saves about U.S.$208,000 in hardware costs every refresh cycle.

SituationFormed in 1976 to regulate Ontario’s new home building industry, Tarion Warranty Corporation is chartered with licensing builders and upholding a provincial government act that protects the rights of home buyers. The Toronto, Canada-based company ensures that builders provide purchasers with warranty coverage, which is guaranteed by Tarion and which arbitrates disputes between the two parties and promotes high standards of building construction. As of December 2010, Tarion has guaranteed warranty protection for almost two million homes and paid out more than CDN$190 million (U.S.$191 million) in claims.

Tarion depends on IT to help it service buyers and builders and to meet the government’s required time frames for registering contractors, filing warranties, and addressing claims. These tasks, combined with the need to process between 55,000 and 80,000 new home enrollments every year, put a tremendous strain on the company’s data center.

Exceeded Data Center Capacity“Over the years, we automated the manual processes involved in enrollments and claims to make them more efficient for home buyers and builders,” says Frank Ferlaino, Manager of Infrastructure and Applications at Tarion Warranty Corporation. “That necessitated transforming much of the work into IT-based processes, which caused our hardware requirements to skyrocket.” During a five-year period, Tarion expanded from 6 servers to 76 servers. By 2008, it was clear that its data center, which was originally intended to run about 44 servers,

simply could not handle the power and cooling needed to keep the infrastructure running. And because it didn’t have enough power, Tarion was getting to the point where it couldn’t even prepare new servers in accordance with its three-year refresh cycle.

Because equipment was often in danger of overheating, the IT department had to take extra steps to keep its systems running. “IT staff members stayed overnight to monitor the systems and make sure they didn’t burn out. About once a month, we took the servers down for several hours so that we could cool the room enough to get the temperature back to normal,” says Ferlaino.

This had a dramatic effect on business. For instance, when servers were down, registered builders could not access the Tarion portal that contained the information they needed to service homeowners. “We had implemented automation to enhance customer service but ended up expanding our environment beyond our data center’s capacity and, as a result, actually hurt customer service. We knew we had to do something to slash power consumption,” says Ferlaino.

Additionally, Tarion had to deal with server management challenges. Provisioning new servers was time-consuming, requiring about one and a half days to configure a new computer and get it up and running. When servers needed upgrades or routine maintenance, Tarion had to take them offline for several hours, during which time the affected users—employees, builders, or homeowners—would not be able to access the workloads. Replacing an existing device also required taking the current server

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“Microsoft virtualization worked great. It had all the functionality we needed, and because we’re so familiar with the Windows environment, it was very easy to learn and use—much simpler than VMware.”

Frank Ferlaino, Manager, Infrastructure and Applications, Tarion Warranty

Corporation

offline for several hours while IT workers copied and transferred the data to the new computer. These efforts were exacerbated when servers were due for refresh. “Every year, we ordered new servers to replace those that were end-of-life and then spent about a month configuring and installing all the replacements,” says Ferlaino.Disaster recovery was also challenging. Tarion sent tape backups to an off-site facility every night. In the event of a disaster, it would need to configure the off-site hardware—a shared environment made available by its recovery services provider—before it could access the data. During the disaster recovery dry runs that Tarion conducted biannually, it took about 24 hours to bring up the replicated systems. Tarion wanted to shrink that time frame so that employees, builders, and homeowners who access the systems could quickly get back online.

In January 2008, Tarion embarked on a virtualization initiative to address its data center issues. “We knew that virtualization would help us consolidate servers and reduce power consumption, and that was our top priority. We had to eliminate overheating and get the data center back to a consistently functioning state,” says Ferlaino. Reached Limits of Virtualization SolutionTarion originally chose VMware server virtualization. “At the time, Microsoft Virtual Server was the only virtualization technology on the market from Microsoft, and the VMware hypervisor was more mature,” says Ferlaino “However, we’re a Microsoft shop—not a Linux shop—so we knew that VMware would likely be a short-term solution.”

The company’s IT team was used to working with the Windows operating system and not Linux, upon which VMware ESX is based. This made it difficult for the IT workers who handled the server infrastructure. “We confined our use of VMware to urgent consolidation needs, cutting about one-third of our physical servers. But we didn’t have the skills to tackle the more complex management requirements,” says Ferlaino.Ferlaino explained that only one member of the IT team had enough knowledge to adequately support VMware. “If that person wasn’t available, we really didn’t have anyone else who could fill in. Even our VMware practitioner began running into issues when he had to do things like get into detailed Linux command levels to perform tasks,” says Ferlaino.

The Tarion IT team found it difficult to troubleshoot issues. For instance, when employees complained about the performance of an Oracle PeopleSoft application that was running on VMware servers, the IT team had to manually check the CPU, memory, and web server along with the Microsoft SQL Server data management software thresholds to pinpoint the congestion area. “With VMware, there was a lot of manual monitoring. It took us about three days to analyze the situation and identify the issue before we could begin to resolve it.”

Tarion had been hoping to use virtualization to enhance disaster recovery. However, after tests with VMware—in which the IT team took snapshots of the images and backed them up to tape for later recovery use on VMware virtual

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“With System Center, we can easily perform just about any management task needed, all from a centralized console. The efficiencies it enables are fantastic.”

Frank Ferlaino, Manager, Infrastructure and Applications, Tarion Warranty

Corporation

servers—Tarion believed it would be too cumbersome because of the demands of working with an unfamiliar environment.

Tarion wanted to extend its virtual environment and make it easier for the IT staff to manage and take advantage of virtualization to enhance disaster recovery.

SolutionIn March 2010, when Tarion Warranty Corporation realized that its licenses for VMware would soon be up for renewal, it began to explore alternatives. “Managing the VMware environment had become very problematic. We had the option to upgrade our solution and add VMware vCenter, but we weren’t inclined to do that, because we knew that not having the right skills would be a huge impediment,” says Ferlaino.

Tarion had been following the progress of Hyper-V virtualization technology and Microsoft System Center data center solutions and was eager to evaluate them. In April 2010, it set up an environment to test Hyper-V instances and create Hyper-V templates. It also wanted to determine whether the IT team could convert VMware virtualization servers into Hyper-V.

“Microsoft virtualization worked great. It had all the functionality we needed, and because we’re so familiar with the Windows environment, it was very easy to learn and use—much simpler than VMware. We were also able to convert VMware servers into Hyper-V so we wouldn’t have to rebuild them,” says Ferlaino.

Tarion purchased a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, consolidating existing licenses for products such as Microsoft SharePoint

Server 2010 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 with new ones for Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter Hyper-V and System Center data center solutions. “With the Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, we could begin taking advantage of Windows Server 2008 and System Center products in a really cost-effective way,” says Ferlaino.

Hyper-V is hypervisor-based server virtualization technology that is built into Windows Server 2008 and enables consolidating multiple server roles as separate virtual machines running on a single physical server. Among other Windows Server 2008 R2 capabilities of which Tarion wanted to take advantage was the snapshot capability, which can be used for capturing images of virtual servers for disaster recovery purposes, and live migration, which enables Tarion to move virtual machines between Hyper-V hosts with no downtime and reduce the planned downtime associated with routine maintenance.

As its VMware servers reached their end of lease, the IT team converted them to virtual servers running Hyper-V, and when the remaining physical servers were due for a refresh, Tarion transitioned those to Hyper-V too. As of August 2011, Tarion has converted all VMware virtual servers to Hyper-V. The company now has 44 Hyper-V virtual servers running on three IBM System x86 server computers. “By using the Datacenter edition of Windows Server 2008 R2, we can run an unlimited number of virtual guests per licensed server and get the most value out of our physical machines,” says Ferlaino.

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“Instead of taking about three hours to provision a new VMware server, it takes just 45 minutes to deploy a server running Hyper-V.”

Frank Ferlaino, Manager, Infrastructure and Applications, Tarion Warranty

Corporation

The virtual servers run a variety of workloads, including Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Client Access and Edge Transport server roles, SharePoint Server 2010, Oracle PeopleSoft customer relationship management software, and a web server that hosts the company’s builder and homeowner portals.

Tarion uses Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 to deploy new and updated software. It began testing Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 in February 2011 and plans to roll it out by October 2011 and use it for provisioning and managing the virtual servers. “With System Center, we can easily perform just about any management task needed, all from a centralized console. The efficiencies it enables are fantastic,” says Ferlaino.

BenefitsTarion Warranty Corporation used Microsoft virtualization and management technologies to reduce the time needed to provision servers and troubleshoot issues. It also vastly improved data center uptime and saved money that was previously spent on hardware refreshes, and the company’s disaster recovery efforts are more efficient.

“By using Microsoft, we expanded our virtualized environment beyond what was possible with VMware, made it much easier to manage, and improved customer service. We can scale our business without worry,” says Ferlaino.

Reduced Provisioning Time by 75 Percent, Eased TroubleshootingAlthough provisioning a new virtual server with VMware was faster than provisioning a

physical server, which took more than a day, it was not as easy as Tarion had hoped. With Microsoft software, this process was much simpler. “Instead of taking about three hours to provision a new VMware server, it takes just 45 minutes to deploy a server running Hyper-V. That’s because the Microsoft interface is more intuitive than VMware and more familiar to my team. Moving from VMware to Hyper-V made it easier for us to scale and handle new requests. For example, we can quickly set up a new virtual server to test new applications and take it down just as fast,” says Ferlaino.

By using System Center products, Tarion can identify performance issues faster. With VMware, it could not set up alerts or centrally monitor virtual servers. But with Microsoft virtualization technologies, Tarion can use automatic alerts to retrieve information about the system. And, because IT can capture all the latency points, Tarion can easily correlate the data to locate the congestion instead of having to address each point separately. “Whereas it took about three days to analyze a PeopleSoft performance problem on VMware, it took just one half of a day to troubleshoot a similar issue using Microsoft. By cutting troubleshooting analysis by more than 80 percent, we resolve problems faster and make employees happier,” says Ferlaino.

Boosted Uptime by 27 Percent, Saved $208,000 Every Refresh CycleTarion eliminated the capacity and overheating issues that its data center had experienced, while allotting room for growth. “If we hadn’t virtualized, we’d need 98 physical servers instead of the 54

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“By cutting troubleshooting analysis by more than 80 percent, we resolve problems faster and make employees happier.”

Frank Ferlaino, Manager, Infrastructure and Applications, Tarion Warranty

Corporation

devices we currently have. Of course, we wouldn’t have been able to support that many servers in our data center—so we would either have had to build out the data center or curtail business growth, neither of which were options.” Downtime decreased dramatically. “By consolidating servers, we eliminated the need to shut down and cool our data center. Our uptime went from 75 percent to 95 percent. Now, builders and homeowners can access the data they need whenever they want, and Tarion can easily meet the government’s mandated time frames for registering contractors, providing warranties, and addressing claims. Our IT employees are also thrilled that they don’t have to work overnight shifts to monitor data center temperature and stability,” says Ferlaino.

Tarion no longer has to take workloads offline when it needs to fix, upgrade, or replace hardware. “By using live migration, we can move affected applications to a different physical device without taking the virtual machine down, and then we can just as easily move them back when the computer is ready. There’s no downtime or disruption at all for users,” says Ferlaino. And by consolidating physical servers and using live migration to aid the refresh process, the Tarion IT team doesn’t have to spend a month every year doing server replacements.

By not needing to purchase so many physical servers, Tarion saves money. “We save about CDN$200,000 [U.S.$208,000] every three-year refresh cycle. That certainly adds up,” says Ferlaino.

Enabled More Efficient Disaster RecoveryTarion can bring up its recovery environment faster, even with the company’s cold recovery strategy, which requires IT workers to configure the hosts before they can obtain images from the backup tapes. “We reduced recovery time by about 25 percent. When we were completely physical-based, it took about 24 hours to configure the additional server computers and bring up the data. Now with Hyper-V, it takes about 18 hours to get everything up and running. That’s several hours faster than our initial VMware-based recovery tests took. Because Hyper-V is built into Windows Server, bringing up a virtual machine instance is easier than it was with VMware,” says Ferlaino.

The company hopes to enhance its disaster recovery process in 2012. In addition to using the snapshot capability in Windows Server 2008 to capture virtual server images, it plans to automatically mirror those images to a replicated virtual environment in the off-site facility. In the event of a disaster, Tarion will simply redirect access to the replicated virtual servers, making data accessible in just a few hours.

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“Our uptime went from 75 percent to 95 percent. Now, builders and homeowners can access the data they need whenever they want, and Tarion can easily meet the government’s mandated time frames.”

Frank Ferlaino, Manager, Infrastructure and Applications, Tarion Warranty

Corporation

Microsoft VirtualizationMicrosoft virtualization is an end-to-end strategy that can profoundly affect nearly every aspect of the IT infrastructure management lifecycle. It can drive greater efficiencies, flexibility, and cost effectiveness throughout your organization. From accelerating application deployments; to ensuring systems, applications, and data are always available; to taking the hassle out of rebuilding and shutting down servers and desktops for testing and development; to reducing risk, slashing costs, and improving the agility of your entire environment—virtualization has the power to transform your infrastructure, from the data center to the desktop.

For more information about Microsoft virtualization solutions, go to: www.microsoft.com/virtualization

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com

For more information about Tarion Warranty Corporation products and services, call (416) 229-9200 or visit the website at: www.tarion.com

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published September 2011

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio− Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter− Microsoft System Center

Configuration Manager 2007− Microsoft System Center Virtual

Machine Manager 2008 R2

Technologies− Hyper-V

Hardware IBM System x86 server computers