This state-run government agency offers IT services to municipalities. For 40 years, this customer provides platforms for finance, human resources, transport, social affairs and real estate, In addition, the customer offers municipalities news on mobile solutions and, with the Citizens Service Portal, the most modern eGovernment platform in Germany.
“We are organized in a way, that our development and testing facilities are separated from the rest of the IT department “, said the head of infrastructure, “we are working constantly to improve our eGovernment platform and refine security as well as redundancy” he continued. They could not afford to lag behind with new updates, but “we wanted a fresh eye on our systems, to avoid not seeing the wood for the trees” explained the customer.
“From prior experience working with government institutions, I knew we had to go the extra mile, when it came to documenting the work performed” explained Gerhard Mautendorfer, comdivision’s project lead. “Particularly in order to prove that we had not lost any data”, said Mautendorfer, “this is always a challenge when migrating databases.”
The task included to upgrade vCloud Director and migrate from a vCloud Director with an external Microsoft SQL server to the vCloud Director Appliance with the embedded Postgres SQL and with a connected NSX manager.
Challenging was also to keep the downtime as short as possible. The research department was using the vCloud Director instance as a test bed for their IaaS services, so the option to roll-back had to be ensured, if required.
Changing the operating system and version of vCloud Director, required to understand the changes it causes, once the required steps were taken and the certificates were reimported, the system could be brought back online. After an initial check following the standardized comdivision checklists, the system was taken out of maintenance. The customer also requested to enable automatic database backup for the vCloud Director instance.
“We performed a Health Check, so we could be absolutely sure nothing was overlooked” said Mautendorfer. Log and performance data were collected for the vCenter Server instance, the hosts, NSX and vCloud Director and a report was presented to the customer.
“Gerhard did a great job” said the head of infrastructure, “even when we ran into a small but crucial error, resulting from a copy and paste problem, Gerhard kept his cool and we were able to work through the issue.”
Even with these issues that would have normally led to delays, comdivision was able to finalize the project in time and budget.
“The best acknowledgement of your work is when the customer asks you when you are available for the next project” laughed Mautendorfer.
