Las Cruces Public Schools Virtualization

Las Cruces Public Schools (LCPS) are located in the 2nd-largest school district in New Mexico. LCPS faced increasing costs and the need to optimize finite resources. Rather than renewing their existing virtualization contract in 2024, the district’s IT Systems Administration team used Red Hat® Learning Subscriptions to upskill their staff, which allowed them to migrate onto Red Hat OpenShift® Virtualization, an included feature of Red Hat OpenShift. LCPS currently runs a private cloud environment that powers critical student and administrative systems with greater speed, flexibility, and cost-efficiency.

Question: Tell us about Las Cruces Public Schools and your team’s role in the district.

Marco Torres-Sanchez, Systems Administrator Lead, Las Cruces Public School System: We are the 2nd-largest school district in New Mexico, serving approximately 27,000 students across 42 different locations. My team manages the systems administrators for the district. We handle a diverse and large number of services—everything from identity management (IdM) and backups to the underlying storage and infrastructure that supports departments such as, human resources (HR), finance, special education, and the daily delivery of education.

Question: What did your infrastructure look like previously, and what drove the decision to modernize?

Torres-Sanchez: Back in 2024, we were managing roughly 180 to 200 virtual machines (VMs). We started looking for alternatives primarily because budget is one of our most finite resources. The reality for public education is that there is never enough money and never enough human resources to manage everything. We have to do more with less.

We were facing significant cost increases with our previous vendor, and we were unwilling to pay that premium. We needed to be mindful of our citizen’s tax dollars while ensuring we didn't sacrifice performance. Several options were evaluated, including open source Kubernetes, but we decided Red Hat was the most sensible choice based on the enterprise expertise and support Red Hat demonstrated over the years.

Question: How did you approach your migration? 

Torres-Sanchez: We decided to trust in our people. We had a timeline, and I spent about 2 weeks learning the material and deciding which features we would roll out. We built a few different versions of our 1st cluster to gain confidence in the configurations. It wasn't about finding a feature-for-feature parity with our previous vendor, because that doesn't exist. It was about embracing a new platform and way of thinking. 

We used Red Hat’s migration toolkit for virtualization to help migrate the VMs. The ability to use the warm migration feature to keep the VMs running during data transfer to Red Hat OpenShift made things very smooth. Once the migration was started, things were very automated allowing us to minimize maintenance windows, reduce stress on our team, and lessen the overall disruptions for end users. 

Question: How did Red Hat Training and Certification help your migration? 

Pablo Solis, System Administrator, Las Cruces Public School System: We were able to tackle the whole configuration on our own by leaning on the documentation and the technology. Training was absolutely necessary to go through this endeavor. I would say 90% to 95% of the implementation knowledge needed can be gained through documentation and training. It provides the foundation. If your team is lacking a strong foundation, you will be unable to really understand the basics of the platform.

I followed a structured Red Hat curriculum that helped me build the skills I needed to pass the Red Hat Certified System Administrator RHCSA® exam, which put me leaps and bounds ahead of where I was prior. It takes a team to get to the bottom of complex issues, and between our training and Red Hat Premium Support engineers being there when we needed them, our team was able to succeed.

Torres-Sanchez:  There is no way to keep a platform like this up and running without having someone with a deep understanding of the infrastructure. Investing in your team’s expertise is critical for a complex project like this. 

Question: Now that you are in production, what does your environment look like?

Torres-Sanchez: We are now operating what we believe is the 1st private cloud environment in a public school district in New Mexico. We have consolidated our digital landscape down to about 100 essential VMs running on Red Hat OpenShift using Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization by focusing on maintaining the most important workloads and decommissioning VMs that were no longer in use. We are running critical applications like our student information system on this new platform. This system is the nerve center for the district because it handles grading, attendance, and resource planning. If that goes down, district computing stops. We also run our staff source-of-truth database, which handles payroll infrastructure and authentication for third-party applications on this platform.

Question: What benefits do you see from OpenShift Virtualization?

Torres-Sanchez: The biggest differentiator that we see is that we are reclaiming our time. Previously, deploying a VM from a template might take 30 to 45 minutes, maybe an hour. Now, by using automation within Red Hat OpenShift, we can roll out a new VM in 5 minutes. Saving time with these technical activities allows us to empower our people to do more. Instead of focusing on scraping together resources, we have a unified tool. Now we need to foster the learning culture so our team can shift their mindset. Then the sky is the limit.

Question: What is next for Las Cruces Public Schools?

Torres-Sanchez: We are planning to embrace Infrastructure as Code and GitOps by 2026, which will involve expanding our use of Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform to configure everything from local area network (LAN) switches to access points. We are also planning to implement Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management alongside Ansible Automation Platform so that we can monitor, manage, automate, perform disaster recovery, and handle remediation across clusters at multiple sites.

We are starting an evaluation of a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) for our student labs. We intend to use the GPUs in that environment for a dual purpose: 

1. When school is in session, they will serve the students' VDI needs.
2. After 5 PM, we plan to use those same GPUs for training data sets and machine learning workloads. 

Recently, we met with Red Hat AI specialists to discuss how we can collaborate on these initiatives. We are moving away from only managing VMs to tackling a truly cloud-native way of working. We are glad to know Red Hat will be there with training and support as we tackle this next phase of our strategy.