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    Challenges

    • Server consolidation – Migrating Servers from Legacy racks to a Host running Type 1 Hypervisor

    About The Client

    A leading Web hosting services provider operating from New Jersey.

     

    Preconditions

    Migrate servers in Legacy rack with minimum downtime using P2V conversion tools.

    Our client choose to virtualize the entire Legacy IT infrastructure as they were battling out an inefficient infrastructure that was costing them more space and money. Some of the factors that we had to consider were time and a migration solution that will not amplify existing problems and bring in an unprecedented down time. Choosing the virtualization solution left us and we did a careful evaluation of all products and technologies which were open source and proprietary. The number of servers to be migrated was close to 54 and it included web, mail, SQL, DNS and application servers.

     

    After exploring all available virtualization products and in consolation with the client. We suggested Hyper-V virtualization for the computing needs and IBM SAN for storage needs. Most of the servers were running Windows OS and we wanted to do a migration using P2V conversion. The conversion process was first executed in our lab environment using Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) and Disk2VHD utility. The converted VM’s were then verified for proper functioning and we demonstrated the P2V capability of our client. After this test run we started converting the VM’s using conversion tools and successfully migrated 54 servers to three different hosts in a month’s time.

     

    P2V conversion of VM’s were all done online where The source computer continues to perform normal operations during the conversion. VMM creates a copy of local NTFS volumes and data of VSSaware applications. VMM leverages the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to ensure that data is backed up consistently while the server continues to service user requests. VMM uses this read-only snapshot to create a VHD. Choosing this conversion model helped us to keep the Source server available throughout the conversion process.

     

    Vitalizing their IT infrastructure helped our clients to greatly reduce their spending on hardware equipment, Licenses, Power and cooling. Furthermore the benefits also included Reductions in hardware requirements by a ratio of 10:1 or better and greater utilization of every server. Finally we also implemented fail-over clustering solution on a host running business critical applications.