CH2M HILL Expects to Save Millions Moving to Microsoft Virtualization Software

CH2M HILL, a Fortune 500 company and a major player in engineering, procurement, construction, management and operations, which switched to Microsoft virtualization and management software from VMware Inc. software, expects to save more than $3.2 million during the next three to five years.

Officials with CH2M HILL (News - Alert) said that the company also expects to reduce server administration work by 30 percent so it can focus on more strategic work like branch office virtualizing, infrastructure upgrading and architecture planning.

CH2M HILL has a global presence of more than 25,000 employees in regional offices that require agile, high availability IT services to serve their customers’ needs and in a cost-effective manner.

CH2M HILL was an early adopter of virtualization technology to curb server proliferation and provide more agile IT services.

Company officials said that between 2005 and 2007, the company used VMware ESX to virtualize 350 servers in its datacenter and 100 servers in regional offices.

When the global economy plummeted in late 2007, company officials said, CH2M HILL decided that it needed a more cost-effective virtualization solution.

“The company was cutting costs across the board, and we wanted to push forward with virtualizing more servers, especially in our field offices, but we just couldn’t do it with VMware,” said Greg Barton, senior analyst, enterprise systems group, CH2M HILL, in a statement.

Barton said that by switching to Microsoft (News - Alert) from VMware, the company will save $280,000 in software fees.

“Plus, we can now afford to tackle our 600 field servers and are aiming to virtualize 20 percent of these computers each year. At $5,000 a server, that’s a savings of $3 million over the next three to five years,” he pointed out.

According to company officials, to date, CH2M HILL has migrated 30 VMware virtual machines to Microsoft Hyper-V and plans to have all its virtual machines, at headquarters and in the field, migrated over the next three years.

Company officials said that CH2M HILL is using its Hyper-V virtual machines for development and test servers and to run critical applications such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, databases running Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Internet Information Services 6.0 and 7.0 Web server, and, soon, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010.

The company uses Microsoft System Center to create virtual machines and give business groups the ability to create virtual machines.

Barton said that System Center Virtual Machine Manager lets business groups self-provision and manage virtual machines as needed, which saves the IT staff a lot of time so the company can plan for future projects and initiatives.

“In fact, we could do everything in Hyper-V that we could do with VMware. Hyper-V also compared well on performance and ease of administration. We were very happy with the results,” he said.

Customers such as CH2M HILL are turning to Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center management tools to help reduce energy consumption, IT labor, and hardware and recurring licensing costs, as well as improve their overall management of on-premises and cloud applications.