Many large hotel chains can only dream about the number of guests who stay at the German Youth Hostel Association (Deutsches Jugendherbergswerk or DJH). In 2007, the 556 youth hostels in Germany recorded more than 10 million overnight stays. And membership has continued to grow year over year; currently, data on almost two million youths and adults is stored in the association’s database.

A careful strategy is behind the ongoing success of the German Youth Hostel Association: as an example, managers of the main association, as well as from 15 regional associations, are trained in its own management academy. In addition, to meet guests’ expectations, the associations invest in refurbishment and modernization projects every year. Even in the IT area, the organization has made great advances in the past few years. DJH Service GmbH, the service organization for the German Youth Hostel Association, with headquarters in Detmold, operates a datacenter for numerous core applications and acts as the IT service provider for the regional associations and the individual youth hostels.

The Challenge: Centralizing IT to Streamline Services and Control Costs

“Our strategy has focused on increasing the centralization of IT functions,” said Ümit Varol, director of IT for DJH Service GmbH.

There were a number of reasons why the DJH Service GmbH wished to centralize delivery of Windows® applications. Providing on-site IT services to the youth hostels was becoming more and more complicated. PCs with locally installed software had to be maintained and updated on a regular basis, and in the case of the breakdown of an end-user device, important applications such as the booking system would be temporarily unavailable. Data back-up was also a huge challenge; employees in the youth hostels were typically not able to perform this function themselves.

Implementing Application Delivery Infrastructure from Citrix

Together with acocon, a Gold Citrix® Solution Advisor, the IT organization began implementing an application delivery solution using Citrix Presentation Server™, Platinum Edition with Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003. A server farm was created for each regional association at the datacenter that is operated in collaboration with acocon. Windows applications including Microsoft® Office and Outlook®, Lotus Notes, the booking and reservation system for the association, as well as applications for personnel planning were moved from local terminals to the central servers. Using Citrix application virtualization technology, they are delivered to employees in the branch offices and the youth hostels via the Internet. End users work with these virtualized applications as if they were still delivered locally to the desktop.

“The regional associations profit from this model in many respects,” said Varol. “Technical support expenses have decreased significantly since we now administer the applications centrally and updates are performed at the server farm instead of on each user’s machine. Even the issue of data back-up can now be addressed centrally – there is no longer the risk that data could be lost, for example, through the failure of an individual PC hard drive. In addition, by operating a single datacenter, we can plan better for IT expenses and ensure high application availability, which we guarantee to the regional associations through Service Level Agreements.”

The Platinum Edition of Citrix Presentation Server offers a number of valuable, integrated technologies for application delivery. For example, communication over the Internet between terminals and servers is encrypted by the SSL VPN solution powered by Citrix Access Gateway™, which is included in the Platinum Edition. All workstations in the youth hostels are securely connected to the datacenter in this way. Citrix® SmartAccess capability allows IT to control which users can access applications and the actions they can take, based on their individual computing scenario. The policy-based SmartAccess technology automatically takes care of this, so that sensitive member data is not accessible when employees access their work environment from a PC in their home office, for example.

Integrated Performance Management and Simplified Support

Another important capability offered by Presentation Server, Platinum Edition is application performance monitoring powered by Citrix® EdgeSight®. The technology delivers continuous real-time information and historical data concerning response times and availability of the applications hosted in the server farm. “We use the solution to identify outliers in the application’s performance,” said Varol. “The helpdesk employee can thus, as a rule, localize the source of the error – for example, an unavailable database – very quickly.”

User support is a responsibility of the DJH Service GmbH. Since the youth hostels are open 365 days a year and employees are working almost around the clock, true 24x7 support is necessary. Since the introduction of the Citrix solution, helpdesk employees use the shadowing capability of Presentation Server for this. Shadowing allows IT staff to view and – with permission – take over the user session from their own monitor. Varol sees a qualitative improvement in user support. “Technical questions on the use of applications, in particular, can be answered much more easily than with just a telephone consultation.” For the few workstations that are not connected to the Citrix environment, the remote support solution Citrix® GoToAssist® is used.

Adding Server Virtualization with Citrix XenServer

Supported by acocon, DJH Service GmbH began the next developmental step – server virtualization – in the spring of 2008. For Nico Lüdemann, project manager for acocon, there were two considerations. “On one hand, there is, of course, always the attempt to avoid investments in additional server hardware. On the other hand, the issue of energy consumption is becoming increasingly important, and underutilized servers unnecessarily strain the IT budget.”

Based on a functional and cost comparison of several approaches, the DJH Service GmbH decided to use Citrix® XenServer™, Platinum Edition. The solution is based on the open source Xen® Hypervisor and offers integrated tools for the management of Windows and Linux virtual machines. “With XenServer, we were able to fulfill 100 percent of the requirements of the German Youth Hostel Association,” said Lüdemann.

The service organization initially introduced the server virtualization solution for one regional association. Four to six virtual servers are implemented on one physical box. The performance of the guest system is hardly affected by virtualization because the lean Xen creates only minimal overhead. In addition, the solution uses the support of the newest server hardware: 64-bit IBM blade servers with Intel VT processors, which are specifically designed for virtual infrastructures.

Increasing Server Utilization and Reducing Datacenter Costs

The immediate impact of the server virtualization project has been higher utilization of the existing hardware resources. “In the future, we will be able to support more users with fewer servers,” said Varol. “Of course, less hardware also means lower energy consumption and lower administrative expenses.”

Administrators use the XenCenter Management User Interface for lifecycle management of the XenServer environment, including configuration, installation, rebooting and uninstallation of the virtual machines. New virtual machines can be created with the help of preconfigured templates or can be cloned, which speeds up provisioning of the virtual infrastructure significantly. In addition, XenMotion technology allows running virtual machines to be moved from one physical server to another without service interruption. The administrators use this capability primarily for testing and maintenance work.

On the Path to a Dynamic Datacenter

With its virtualization strategy, the DJH Service GmbH is pursuing the goal of being able to dynamically allocate IT resources. “For example, we only use our payroll accounting application intensively a few days a month. With Citrix XenServer, Platinum Edition we can now provide flexible additional computing capacity during this period.” To accomplish this, the team uses the provisioning capability included in the product. A standard image of a server workload is streamed on demand to any number of virtual or physical machines. A reboot is sufficient to change a Web server to a Presentation Server on which the necessary payroll accounting software runs, for example. “Since any of the many servers can be booted from one standard image, the storage costs for server images can be significantly reduced,” explained Varol.

The German Youth Hostel Association datacenter should be entirely virtualized in the medium term with XenServer; the server farms for the individual regional associations will also remain logically separate, but will access the same pool of physical servers. With this solution, additional computing capacities will always be available exactly where they are needed most critically – in the summer, for example, to support the youth hostels at the North Sea and Baltic Sea, and in the winter, to support frequently visited facilities in ski areas.

For this reason, the IT director sees the service organization as well positioned for the future. “With the integrated solution approach of the Citrix Delivery Center, we are striking a new path to a truly dynamic datacenter. On the one hand, we are in a position to use and manage our IT resources optimally, and on the other hand, we will improve the cost efficiency and cost transparency of the IT infrastructure. In this, we have a hand in ensuring that the youth hostels can continue to offer their guests good service and the lowest possible overnight costs in the future.”

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