Problem, and risk assessment in our current environment and suggested solutions for them.
Problem – Rack Space is limited, hardware utilization is at 10%, cost per server roll is high which creates a struggle for prioritizing and justifying IT projects, and power consumption is unnecessarily very high.
Solution – All of these issues are resolved with VMWare infrastructure server.
VMWare infrastructure adds 70% hardware utilization which allows for 95% less hardware. This reduces cost in hardware that will pay for the DR solution and reduce cost of environment and decrease space utilization and battery / power consumption.
Problem - Current environment lacks flexibility. Implementation for new servers is time consuming and dependant on “build to order” servers for new projects. Demand for IT projects greatly exceeds IT capacity. IT is redeploying IT resources (which causes further delays).
Solution – Virtualization adds the flexibility by harnessing the full power of our hardware, decreasing server provisioning time, and freedom to test configuration changes and new solutions without commitment of hardware expenses.
Problem - Current Maintenance and testing is done on “test” servers which can add unnecessary hardware expense, its manual, time consuming and difficult to recover in the event of problem.
Solution - VMotion and DRS.
VMotion and DRS enable non-disruptive maintenance
a. enables VM migration without downtime for applications and users.
b. DRS makes it easy to perform server maintenance without downtime for applications and users.
c. Snap shot technology gives us recovery in a few minutes from any change made to a server instead of a few days.
d. Test servers that are virtualized don’t use hardware resources unless they’re turned on. Test servers that have been virtualized don’t need a separate “test” server set aside through the ability to recover from snapshots.
Problem- Complex / hardware dependent environments create unreliability. Out of warranty production servers make us vulnerable to high amounts of downtime due to lack of resources.
- Fact: 1 of 4 organizations had significant disruption in their systems. 24% of those outages were > 24 hours
- Fact: Almost 60% of surveyed companies incurred significant financial trouble as a result.
Current solution- Rebuilding servers from backup, if out of warranty hardware fails we don’t have a plan in place. This creates slow, significant downtime, is hardware, driver, firmware dependent.
Potential solution- Standby server – Expensive, hard to maintain
Current solution- Clustering – Complexity
Proposed Solution - Using virtual hardware coupled with the HA (High Availability) and VMotion components of VMWare. Added benefits of these solutions include;
a. High Availability – automatically restarts VM’s.
b. Hardware independent.
c. Easy to implement and configure.
d. Replication of system state ensures a VM has all it needs to startup.
e. Easier testing.
f. More reliable
G. Achieve company recovery time objectives.
H. Make disaster recovery faster and more reliable through automation.
Problem - Complex OS and software recovery processes creates vulnerability and added downtime when OS and software corruption occur.
Current Solution – Attempt to resolve through diagnostics and as a last resort we’ll do a manual reinstallation and configuration.
Proposed Solution- Software and OS recovery issue is resolved with VMWare Infrastructure backups.
Non-disruptive to applications and users
Provide Off-host backup using standard backup software
Restoration is simplified and more reliable.
Time to restore or resolve takes minutes instead of hours or days
