Business Situation
Unilever has aggressive plans to double in size within the next ten years, but did not want IT costs - including the environmental cost of data center power consumption - to double as well. To support this growth, Unilever worked with Avanade to migrate from VMware to Hyper-V technology in Windows Server 2008 R2. It then used Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center 2012 to create a private cloud that contains 3,175 virtual machines. With its private cloud, Unilever will deliver IT services 40% faster and be more agile in the workplace. By eliminating hundreds of servers, Unilever realized significant savings and became a better environmental citizen.
Working with Avanade, Unilever is upgrading to Windows Server 2012 to gain even more IT efficiency.
Solution
Avanade worked with Unilever to identify scenarios that it might address with private cloud computing, which included automatic physical and virtual-server provisioning, IT service orchestration and granular transparency for individual services.
With Avanade’s help, Unilever created a private cloud in its global data centers that consisted of 38 eight-node clusters running 3,175 virtual machines. It has another 110 Hyper-V host servers in remote offices running a total of nearly 500 Hyper-V virtual machines and this number will be increasing.
Unilever is now using a single Cloud Management Console, System Center 2012, to automate many of the time-consuming manual tasks which previously slowed the delivery of IT services to the business. Seeing virtual machine density of between 20 and 22 guests per host, it expects to increase that as it optimizes memory allocation with Windows Server 2012.
Results