Case Study

Industry  :  Insurance, India

Objective  :  Upgrade and migrate to a Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC) for hosting applications, leveraging Dell-EMC VxRail.

Challenges:

Beyond walking the tactful path of concurrence with the customer team and providing the  confidence to them, the technical challenges in the project were:

  • The legacy environment was broken with separate SSO domains.
  • vMotion (live migration) was not working.
  • Cluster nodes are not configured for EVC mode making VM/application migration tricky.
  • Incompatible CPUs within the existing environment across and within clusters.
  • Shared storage was not visible to all hosts within a cluster.
  • Multiple vSphere clusters (total 7) and the customer required these to be consolidated to 3 clusters in the new environment.
  • A mixed environment where hosts were installed with vSphere 5.0, 5.5 and 6.0.
  • Multiple windows based vCenter servers.
  • Multiple dvSwitch versions – causing incompatibility from a migration perspective.
  • Being a financial organization there were many security policies and compliances that were required to be adhered to.

One of the other key challenges was, this was a year old order where sizing was done with different capacity parameters thus in present times the customer had less hardware (storage specifically in certain vSAN clusters) than required. Customers had a global mandate of FTT2 for production workloads and FTT1 for test/dev workloads. Customers did not have the budget to buy new hardware for this project and there were strict timelines to be met.

Solutions

Leveraging tools such as Cross-vCenter migration and custom scripts the team derived a plan to execute this migration/upgrade project. We not only executed the defined scope of work within the said timelines but also received customer appreciation for the way the Team Smartedge handled the project timelines with negligible downtimes.
Benefits:
  • VM/application workload migration was successfully completed in a timely manner.
  • Planned migration activities allowed for negligible downtime along with minimal impact to business operations.
  • All issues with the old infrastructure were resolved.
  • Customer noticed improved manageability along with better visibility across all workloads.
  • With custom vRealize Operations dashboards, the customer was able to proactively respond to business risks, monitor utilization and manage capacity within the infrastructure.
  • Custom built CIO dashboards allowed the customer to get a quick overview of the infrastructure.
  • vRealize LogInsight provided a centralized logging infrastructure for:
    • Faster troubleshooting and root cause analysis
    • Improved mechanism to meet audit and compliance mandates
  • The team developed custom vROPs dashboards that were much appreciated by the customer. As part of project deliverables custom vRA blueprints with hostname customization and T-Shirt sizing were delivered. Post migration the customer was able  to provide better SLAs to the business. The team also delivered a full set of documentation which included design documents, HLDs, LLDs and As-Built documents. The customer’s operations team was enabled with appropriate knowledge transfer sessions for supporting Day 2 operations.