Hyper-V Deployment Case Study – Sporton International

Brass Contributor

Mar 21, 2019

First published on TECHNET on May 21, 2008

Managing 60 servers is no small feat when it comes to midsize company, Sporton International in Taiwan. With limited IT resources, Sporton decided to turn to Systex Corporation (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner) to explore options to virtualize their physical servers in an effort to reduce operation cost while improving the agility and manageability of their server assets. Here're the case study highlights:

1) What was deployed?

35 physical production servers were virtualized with Hyper-V Release Candidate into on three physical servers (that's 12:1 consolidation ratio).
10 virtual machines were configured with Hyper-V clustering to support Sporton's business continuity and disaster recovery needs.
The Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Tool was used to collect the performance metrics of every server in the data center and to identify which servers were good candidates. The MAP tool saved a substantial amount (60%) of inventory and planning time – which otherwise would have to be done manually.

2) Why deployed with Hyper-V?

Optimizing Hardware Assets to Cut Costs: Saved on 70% of hardware costs & increased server utilization from 10-15% to about 70%
Streamlining Provisioning to Boost Responsive IT Service: Cut the time it takes for our IT staff to provision a server by up to 70 percent, which is critical to the productivity of the development and IT departments
Improving Availability for Better Business Continuity: Provided better continuity of IT service to internal users through quick migration and clustering technology from Microsoft
Hyper-V offers better and more familiar user interface as well as lower cost of ownership than VMware

3) In the customer’s own words....

"Hyper-V in Release Candidate 0 was so reliable that we deployed VMs into the production environment serving all Internet guests and customers, and our subsidiaries in Taiwan, China, and Korea" - Kathy Lin, IT Manager of Sporton International.
"Hyper-V is the best virtualization solution running on Windows Server 2008, with enhanced performance and stability for Sporton at a fraction of the cost of VMware’s hypervisor-based offering." - David Feng, Technical Services Director of Systex Corp.

4) Where to find the tools mentioned in this case study and other key virtualization resources?