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Energie AG

Infrastructure Harmonization

The Challenge

The relocation of Energie AG provided the opportunity for the creation of a virtual infrastructure. The new building offered significantly less space for the installation of a computer centre than had been available in the old premises. The relocation had to be done quickly, since cost obviously played a decisive role.
S&T Austria worked together with Energie AG, therefore, to help evaluate possible alternatives to the direct physical transportation of the computer from one location to the other. After detailed cost comparison, it was decided that the major part of the original server landscape could be migrated into a virtual infrastructure onto a VMware-Basis.

The Project

Energie AG began the virtualisation project with the initial connection of two HP computers to the ESX Server 2.5. The VMware P2V Assistant helped with the relocating of the physical system into virtual machines on the ESX server.

This tool facilitated the rapid and reliable migration from physical to virtual machines. Complex configurations including applications were integrated into a virtual infrastructure. Automatic transfer not only saved time, but also made the transfer more reliable.

In the second phase, the virtual infrastructure was extended to four HP Proliant servers, each with eight Intel processors under an ESX server and two physical computers at the split locations. All the systems are linked through an EMC Symetrix SAN. The regular transfer of data into the storage system heightens fault tolerance and guarantees increased service availability. Under normal conditions of operation, computing capacity is shared equally between the physical systems through load balancing. Where necessary,
VMware Virtual SMP allows a virtual machine to have additional physical processors available.

During equipment maintenance or in the event of equipment failure, virtual machines can be transferred in the shortest time from the affected hardware to a back-up physical machine. Thanks to the installation of the VMware Virtual Centre with VMotion, this can even be carried out during operation without the user noticing any shift in the virtual machine.

Benefit for the Customer

• savings on the cost of hardware, on space and on power requirements
• centralised monitoring of all virtual machines
• new system commissioned as a „turn-key“ solution