Our customer is a global player in the reinsurance industry. It is required that globally used services which are running on vSphere are being made ready for the future regarding security and carbon footprint.
“For years we are running successfully a VMware backed environment for Windows & Linux workloads for our customers all over the globe” said the Senior Cloud Engineer and Vice President Group Technology Services. He continued “even though the corporate strategy follows an intensive cloud strategy, the on-prem environment has been proven as stable, reliable and highly available for our customers in recent years. Due to the green datacenter program, we need to not just bring vSphere to the next level, but also consolidate the Servers in an optimal way”.
“During the initial workshop, we analyzed the customer’s infrastructure and projected workload” said Fabian Lenz, comdivision’s lead architect on the case, “due to hardware requirements of vSphere 7 several new servers were required to be purchased and a completely new cluster design must have been created that keeps up with licensing (Red Hat & Windows Server), capacity and carbon footprint requirements”.
“We designed the vSphere infrastructure, including a strategy to support an optimized Red Hat and Windows licensing on vSphere with a minimal server footprint” explained Lenz. “For the upgrade, we analyzed all relevant products and subcomponents so that all risks for the stability have been mitigated upfront.” In order to remain future ready, a security hardening according to CIS guidelines must have been done. Since the current vSphere releases are getting out of support in October 2022 an upgrade to vSphere 7 was crucial. During the target design, several legacy components like the Hitachi Dynamic Link Manager have been removed on all existing hosts after the successful upgrade. That created a much easier operational lifecycle management for the next years. All the changes were planned and applied in a way that existing microservices’ architecture for the ServiceNOW integration remained functional after the finalization.
“We decreased the numbers of physical quad-processors servers from 46 to 22” raved the senior cloud engineer, “we were also able to save a serious amount of money in licence and power savings for the next three years while keeping our reliable vSphere infrastructure” he continued.
Together with comdivision the reinsurance company is about to analyze further potentials of the existing vSphere environment to fulfil a true hybrid-cloud in the future.
