“Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter is ideal for our hosting environment because it offers advanced, reliable virtualization that’s cost-effective and simple to deploy.”

Neil Lathwood, IT Director, UKFast

Hosting provider UKFast worked with Microsoft to deploy a high-availability virtualized environment that powers cloudhosts.co.uk. Built on Windows Server® 2008 R2 Datacenter, CloudHosts is a leading scalable and on-demand cloud solution. Offering cost-effective licensing, simple management, and an expected uptime of 99.999 percent, the technologies managing the environment are also being used within stand-alone solutions for other companies in the rapidly growing UKFast customer base.


Business Needs

Since its founding in 1999, UKFast has achieved an average annual growth rate of 67 percent by providing fast, dependable Internet hosting services and high-quality customer support. As evidence of this emphasis on quality, the Internet Services Providers’ Association has named UKFast “Best Hosting Provider” for four years running. UKFast also won in the new category of “Best Business Customer Service” in 2009. The Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner has acquired a rapidly expanding base of satisfied customers.

With the goal of accelerating commerce and learning through the Internet, UKFast undertook a comprehensive market research project on the online business environment. The company ascertained that there was a business need for resilient and highly available solutions without the high costs usually associated with such implementations. This resulted in the architecture of a cloud solution able to achieve high performance, scalability, and resilience while retaining affordability.

An on-demand cloud environment was also shown to act as an incubation platform for stand-alone virtualized solutions and upgrades to faster performing dedicated servers. By using this platform, UKFast could help more customers grow from an earlier stage in their online evolution, making it possible for them to upgrade their solution either virtually or with dedicated hardware as they developed.

Solution

In March 2009, UKFast began working on CloudHosts. Each customer is provided with a virtual machine—a “slice” of the infrastructure (cloud) whose size depends on the customer’s capacity needs. The advantage of this model is that while resources such as bandwidth are shared, UKFast controls the competition for resources. This means that the zero-contention policy that UKFast applies to bandwidth usage is applied to resource usage within the cloud. Equally, CloudHosts is designed so that customers can expand their resource usage with an on-demand action rather than a longer order process that requires the physical alteration of servers.

After careful consideration of the options, UKFast chose Microsoft products including the Windows Server® 2008 R2 Datacenter operating system to help support the cloudhosts.co.uk infrastructure. They met the right benchmarks and offered the most sensible way forward to achieve objectives for resilience, scalability, and performance. “Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter is ideal for our hosting environment because it offers advanced, reliable virtualization that’s cost-effective and simple to deploy,” says Neil Lathwood, IT Director at UKFast.

At each data center, Dell PowerEdge R610 physical servers take advantage of the enhanced Hyper-V™ virtualization technology in Windows Server 2008 R2 to run the CloudHosts infrastructure that facilitates the customer workloads. Additional physical servers function as a management environment based on the same technology and run Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 along with System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2, Data Protection Manager 2010, and Configuration Manager 2007 R2 for environment management, automation, and protection. Dell EqualLogic PS6000 Series storage area network devices and Cisco switching components round out the hardware.

UKFast worked with Microsoft over a six-month period to develop the environment. The solution entered a pilot phase in August 2009 and went into full production the next month. Building on the positive experience that it gained from the implementation, UKFast is now replicating the environment’s successful architecture for many of its enterprise-level customers to increase value and functionality.

Benefits

The Windows Server 2008 R2–based environment from UKFast that powers the CloudHosts infrastructure offers many benefits, including:

High reliability and uptime. It was crucial to UKFast that any cloud product uphold the company’s reputation for extremely high levels of uptime. Windows Server 2008 R2 impressed the development team with its reliability from the start. Lathwood says, “We have many customers that need their solutions up and running 99.99 percent of the time or more. We adopted Windows Server 2008 R2 because it allows us to exceed this goal. Even the prerelease versions were very stable.”

Lathwood goes on to emphasize the importance of Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV), which are disks in a failover cluster that all nodes can read from and write to at the same time. A related feature, Live Migration, builds on CSV to support moving virtual machines from one Hyper-V physical host to another without disruption of service. He says, “The Cluster Shared Volumes feature ensures that any downtime is absolutely minimal should we suffer a hardware failure. It’s a critical feature that we’ll be relying on for many solutions in the future because it eliminates the single-point-of-failure problem that previous architectures had.” He adds, “Our research shows that business environments routinely experience time-consuming failovers, and companies are crying out for 99.999 percent uptime. We can now offer them this capability alongside seamless, automated failover procedures.”

A cost-effective virtualized environment. UKFast sees Windows Server 2008 R2 as a strategic virtualization solution that will help drive business growth. “We looked at a solution from VMware but determined that its added costs would offer no real benefits,” says Lathwood. “However, with Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter licensing, we can run an unlimited number of virtualized operating system instances. This cost-effective licensing, combined with the software’s reliability and performance, gives us the scalability we need to grow and stay competitive.”

Windows Server 2008 R2

Windows Server 2008 R2 is the latest version of the Windows Server operating system from Microsoft. With Windows Server 2008 R2, you can create solutions that are easier to plan, deploy, and manage than with previous versions of Windows Server. Building on the features, security, reliability, and performance provided by Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 extends connectivity and control to local and remote resources. This means that your organization can benefit from reduced costs and increased efficiencies gained through enhanced management and control over resources across the enterprise.

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