For one of its long-standing clients from the construction industry, LAN Project, at the turn of the years 2012 and 2013, carried out the process of virtualization of servers.
The server infrastructure was composed of two Microsoft Windows 2003 servers, which served as the domain controller and file server, for ERP application and printouts and as a mail server, operating under Linux OS.
The reasons for initiating the migration process to virtual environment were the following:
a) preventing the failures of the hardware on which the services were installed. The hardware continued to be used for more than 4 years.
b) insufficient disk space for file and mail server and unwillingness to invest in old physical infrastructure
Process objective:
– minimisation of dependence of IT infrastructure on hardware platform
– increasing the level of protections from data loss as a result of hardware failures
– reducing the time needed for restoring the infrastructure/data after breakdown
– minimisation of the costs of investment and IT infrastructure maintenance
The assumption made: the impact of migration of the existing services and data on the business functions of the Client should be as limited as possible
Description of the solution:
In order to avoid long interruptions, expenditures on new software and additional disk resources for each of the three functioning servers, the Client followed Lan Projekt’s advice and decided to virtualize the IT systems in operation (the operating system, applications, data) based on a new physical server and MS Server software. The new server, after deploying the hyper-v virtualisation manager function, served as a platform for starting up the virtual servers, representing the so far operating physical servers. This resulted in a few hours of interruption in service availability and the entire migration process took place at night, to avoid inconvenience for the Client.
In addition, through eliminating two physical machines, with the use of state-of-the-art power-efficient IMB server, there was a reduction of power energy consumption for powering the devices used for cooling the server-room.
