Veka Rechenzentren – Recovery automated

Veka AG produces and distributes uPVC profiles globally with a yearly turnover of more 650 million euro. There IT is operated from the german head quarter where a small number of people ensures that the three datacenter operating VMware globally are up and running. In a review on operations and disaster recovery conducted in 2010 comdivision identified several areas for improvement in business continuity.

In a first step the current existing operations management and disaster recovery infrastructure was revalidated. One of the first issues identified was the need for a highly agile monitoring solution fitting to the private cloud setup Veka operates. Secondly the upgrade path to vSphere 5 identified the need for a fully redundant vCenter installation.

In a multiple step approach comdivision worked with the internal Veka IT team to fix these issues. In phase one a new monitoring based on vCenter Operations Manager was integrated for future operations monitoring and better capacity management. Phase two was to solve the need for a high available and reliable vCenter, this was achieved by the setup of vCenter Server Heartbeat to split the vCenter to operate from two datacenters in parallel, a critical demand to use the vSphere Auto Deploy feature. Phase 3 was to ensure that a datacenter failover is easy to achieve, eventhough the implementation of Site Recovery Manager was identified as not applicable we solved the issues with a custom PowerCLI development.