This government datacenter in Europe provides infrastructure at 1.200 locations throughout the country. More than 350 e-government solutions such as budget accounting, e-finance and federal personnel management, e-customs, company and land register depend in large parts on a smoothly running Oracle database. Because it was hard to guarantee better SLA’s with the current physical hardware the database runs on, the customer turned to comdivision to help with the virtualization.
"The system was running on physical IBM Power Servers with AIX” said the database admin, “because of changing demand – for example during election time – we had trouble meeting our SLA” he continued.
“During the initial workshop, we analysed the customer’s infrastructure” said Yves Sandfort, comdivision’s lead architect on the case, “the IBM Power Servers needed a refresh and we proposed to replace them with x86 hardware that would run RedHat Enterprise Linux on vSphere”, said Sandfort.
“We designed the vSphere infrastructure, including a strategy to support the Oracle licensing on vSphere” explained Sandfort. “In order to be able to proactively adjust the compute resources for the cluster, we integrated VMware’s vRealize Operations and vRealize Log Insight” Sandfort continued.
vRealize Operations provides continuous performance optimization, efficient capacity and management, as well as intelligent remediation and integrated compliance. “Combined with vRealize Log Insight, which provides deep operational visibility and faster troubleshooting through the use of highly scalable log management with sophisticated analytics, the customer will be able to spot performance issues before they occur” said Sandfort.
Critical support during the migration phase was also provided and standardization for the new virtual infrastructure to ease troubleshooting was introduced.
“Migrating the large Oracle databases to the new virtual infrastructure resulted in a 70% performance increase” raved the customer’s head of IT infrastructure “we were also able to save 10 million euros in license savings for the next 3 years” he continued, “backup and restore is now easier and streamlined and we are finally able to meet the SLA!”.
The customer is planning to implement a Private Cloud with vRealize Automation.
