Infrastructure comprises of the following core entities

• Citrix Xen Server 5.6 and 6.1 Enterprise Ed
• Quantastor Storage
• PHDVBA backup
• Virtuozzo 4.0, PVA 4.6 and 4.7
• Cloud Linux
• Storage Xen motion
• Citrix Xen convert
• High Availability Failover

About The Client

About The Client

A leading Tier 1 Hosting company which Operates from Florida.

Re-seller hosting services, dedicated servers and cloud hosting services are the main line of business. actsupport is the Outsource partner offering L3&L4 support services from the delivery center in India.

 

Task

Server Virtualization And Consolidation (Migrating Legacy Servers To Citrix Xen Server)

Preconditions – Migration should be done without any downtime. Less support issues and no end users should suffer any downtime. Slash hardware requirements, Build a cost effective scalable IT infrastructure without any impact on performance, and reduce spending on IT assets and increase profit margin.

 

Solution Offered

actsupport after an extensive research and feasibility study proposed a Migration solution that was accepted by the client and it was successfully accomplished in a short time with less human resources. We chose Citrix Xen hypervisor for our computing needs and Quantastor SAN box for the storage needs, Network portability was facilitated by Softlayer. The choice was made after several rounds of discussions with the client on different virtualization products available and our conclusion was centered on the lab results and white papers released by the product vendors. After the hardware was provisioned we started moving the servers seamlessly, we had to use different migration tools to complete the task, P2V-physical to Virtual machine migration was done using Xenconvert tools to convert a physical server to a VHD and the same was imported into the hosts running in the Virtual environment. Every server was migrated with great care to ensure there was zero down time and the migration was completed within the estimated time. We also implemented a high availability solution in the cloud infrastructure to offer unmatched upstream services without downtime. Finally a virtual snapshot backup model PHDVBA was implemented as a part of disaster recovery solution.

 

In the subsequent quarter post migration to cloud, we were able to witness measurable results and there was a considerable increase in the profit margin. With the increased stability there were rave reviews on the web, new orders were placed and the sales prospects improved after transition to cloud. As we forecast-ed more signups we also recommended the client for addition of new hosts and system resources. Our client’s 2013 fiscal report indicates that actsupport’s solution has contributed greatly to a steady increase in the revenue and new end user signup’s. We also completed another storage migration task for our client using storage Xenmotion tool by moving all storage repositories from our smaller capacity server to a larger box that can stack more number of volumes in future. This was a live migration done seamlessly with no downtime at all. We also moved all our Windows and Linux Virtuozzo nodes to VM’s residing in the Xenhosts which depicted a Virtualization inside a virtualizer model thus saving more space, time and ultimately money.

 

With actsupport’s solution and on-going support our client was able to achieve million dollar savings and it has provided a desperate relief from spending in IT assets and their focus has shifted to business innovation, sales/marketing promotions and new start-ups.