Disaster Recovery Site Using VMware ESX Server
Problem
South Colonie Central School Districts prides itself on being out in front of other schools in the area of technology. In recent years they went from being primarily an ISDN network to a fully integrated fiber network. While their network backbone went through significant upgrades their system and server operations still lagged behind.
There were several problems. The first was the lack of a comprehensive disaster recovery plan. As a school district protection of student records and financial data is abso-lutely critical. Like most organizations the district performed regular backups of their servers but had no plan for a catastrophic event affecting the main data center. The district needed a disaster recovery site that would be available in the event of such a catastrophic event. The costs for such a plan would be astronomical in hardware alone. A third party recovery site service would be even more costly. Therefore, the district needed a solution which would meet their requirements while being cost effective at the same time. This was more than just theoretical for the district as major outages have occurred in the past.
Next was aging server hardware that had run out of warranty. The school district was faced with having to purchase several new servers, which they knew would be underuti-lized. The underutilization would be caused by the fact that several of their education programs require a dedicated server. Therefore, they desired a solution that would allow them to address the unique nature of these programs while getting the most use out of their hardware at the same time.
Solution: VMWare ESX Server Enterprise Edition
The district asked Lucid Solutions Group, an IT services company with a strong presence in New York State Capital District, to provide a solution that would solve both problems. This was a tall order but after performing a thorough analysis of the network and the needs of the school district, Lucid recommended moving to a virtual environment using VMWare ESX Server as the platform. The results were as follows:
- Cost effective disaster recovery remote site
- Fast provisioning of servers – minutes instead of days
- Consolidation of aging physical servers
- Elimination of separate physical servers for software titles
- Centralized server management
Working with the IT staff Lucid was able to accomplish the following:
- Created two separate VMWare sites; one in the main data center and another at a remote location to serve as the disaster recovery site. Lucid configured identical Dell PowerEdge 2950s / AX150i iSCSI SAN solution in both locations. Each site also contained a Dell Power Vault 124T tape auto loader. This configuration allowed duplication of the main data center to the disaster recovery remote site.
- Virtualized all aging physical servers and stored the virtual versions, allowing them to be fully managed by the PowerEdge 2950 ESX Servers.
- Configured Symantec Backup 12d to perform file level backups of all virtual machines for the purpose of recovering individual files and folders.
- Configured virtual machine synchronization, replication and backups between the main data center and the remote recovery site, ensuring current versions of the virtual machines in the main data center also existed in the recovery site.
- Configured VMWare High Availability (HA), Dynamic Resource Sched-uling (DRS) and VMotion allowing virtual machines to move between ESX servers in the main data center in the event of physical ESX failure.
- Configured virtual machine templates for the purpose of fast provisioning of virtual machines.
Simplified Disaster Recovery
The school district now has the peace of mind that all of their critical servers and data reside in a separate physical location in the case of catastrophic disaster. In fact, Lucid Solutions Group performed a disas-ter recovery dry run, in which a critical server was brought online in the recovery site in a matter of minutes during a simulated outage. The district can now shift its operations to the recovery site with full access to its critical data and shift operations back to the main data center when needed.
Disaster recovery cold and hot sites are usually cost prohibitive for most organizations. Virtualization and VMWare in particular have made a reality out of what was once an unattainable vision.
Education software that requires a dedicated server is no longer a problem. Using pre-configured virtual machine templates stored on the Dell AX150i the IT staff can provision new servers in a matter of minutes. Accomplishing the same goal using physical servers and disk duplication can literally take days. Not to mention the separate physical servers that would be needed.
Attachments:
sccsdcasestudy1.pdf [ ]167 Kb