Young’s Seafood Limited had outgrown their existing VMware estate which had originally consisted of a number of IBM System x Servers and IBM N series (NetApp) storage but had organically grown to include a number of other aging servers and storage solutions including HP MSA. They also had a requirement to implement a disaster recovery solution for their core systems.
My role was to produce a Low Level Design (LLD) for the replacement architecture which consisted of an IBM Flex System solution at two of their sites along with IBM XIV storage. VMware Site Recovery Manager was chosen along with SAN based XIV replication between the two sites to provide the disaster recovery requirements. The complete solution was backed up with TSM for VE.
Once the design was approved I worked with the Young’s Seafood project team to implement the XIV storage, IBM Flex System, including Flex System Manager (FSM), VMware vSphere v5.5 along with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and the TSM4VE backup solution. This allowed me to provide skill transfer to the Young’s IT Team enabling them to manage the new environment once in production.
VMware vSphere Replication was also implemented to protect workloads at 3 remote sites, replicating the virtual machines back to the main data centre.
Their new ERP service was the first application to use the new infrastructure and a disaster recovery test was successfully performed using Site Recovery Manager.
My final task was to provide a migration strategy to move the mixture of existing COTS middleware and custom application workloads from the old VMware environment across to the new infrastructure. Young’s internal operations team then took on the task of migrating these workloads.