Hyper-V Case Study

     

     

    Current Scenario

    Investor First are an investment company with their headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.  They also have offices in the UK and the United States.  They have a heterogeneous network consisting of mixture of Windows, Apple clients and various Smart Phones.

     

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    End users require always on anywhere access to their email, remote access to the network data.  Users also require around the clock access to this data.  The IT requirements are:

     

    • File and Print
    • Email
    • Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution
    • Database server
    • Mobile Device Access
    • Backup solution
    • Windows XP Professional and Windows 7 clients, Apple Mac laptops

    • Remote Access

    Challenges

    Investor First were managing twelve servers, 10 in Ireland and one each in the United States and the United Kingdom.

     

    The servers were expensive to manage and server downtime (failures, maintenance etc.) was a effecting the business.

     

    Investor First wanted a number of solutions to the current problems from the proposed solution.

     

    • Similar/ reliable infrastructure
    • A more cost effective solution

    • Less downtime

       

    Proposed Scenario

    Move to a Highly Available Hyper-V Clustered scenario using shared iSCSI storage.

      

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    Move to a Highly Available Hyper-V Clustered scenario using shared iSCSI storage.

    Benefits

    • Cost
      • Less electricity is used to power the servers savings costs
      • Less electricity is required to cool the servers saving costs
      • Core Parking in Server 2008 R2 saves energy by shutting down the cores which are not being used saving costs
      • Less Physical failures with less physical servers
      • The current servers could be utilised, no need to purchase new hardware (except RAM)
      • Certain jobs are now scriptable thanks to PowerShell and may be run at off peak times
    • Uptime
      • Services may be moved from one Hyper-V host to another preventing downtime
      • Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 Live Migration lets an administrator move Virtual Machines by right clicking VMs
      • VMM 2008 R2 has a maintenance mode, allowing automatic movement of  VMs and preventing false positives in Operations Manager

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