Johannesburg, 08 Nov 2011
Fast nearing the state of maximum resource utilisation (population: too many), Auto Trader needed an urgent detour to an infrastructure upgrade.
Craig Langley, IT Manager, Auto Trader, has commented that their cluster environment was unstable: “Our existing HP Blade server cluster has been great; however, there is no network redundancy built into the hypervisor running the cluster. Apart from maxing out resources, this also means there was no live migration functionality for virtual machines; an upgrade was urgent!”
As Auto Trader's preferred business partner for all things IT, Synergy Group rallied her ninjas and they embarked on a well-planned journey of upgrading the firmware on the entire infrastructure, and migrating the existing cluster to VMware. But first, they demonstrated the power of two possible solutions.
Brennan Fritz, Godan* IT Ninja, Synergy Group, outlines the options: “One demonstration was for the existing hypervisor cluster built on Server 2008 R2 Core Hosts, and the other was a VMware 4.1 cluster to test the functionality of the two products.”
Auto Trader decided to go the VMware route, as version 5.0 was released. Knowing the benefits of version 4.1, it was eager to harness that extra chi from the latest offering.
In a show of seamless migration and IT expertise, the ninjas updated firmware on the HP 4400 Enterprise Virtual Array, all the disks in the storage area network, all the Blade servers, and the fibre switches.
A major part of the plan was to consolidate two BL460 Blade servers to free them up in order to create a two-node secondary cluster on which Auto Trader currently runs its test environment. Two BL680 nodes were installed with ESXi 5.0, and VCenter set up in order to convert all the virtual servers from hypervisor to VMware virtual servers. ESXi was then installed on the remaining two BL680 nodes for the primary cluster, which were then added to the BL680 ESXi 5.0 cluster.
Langley, pleased with the results, declares: “We are very happy with our new server infrastructure. The Synergy Group 'ninjas' are beyond knowledgeable and their helpful advice and seamless implementation has ensured a level of infrastructure stability that we have not experienced before.”
As the Synergy ninjas fight their good fight against IT evil, another server demon bites the dust.
*5th Dan Black Belt - a skilled IT consultant with extensive knowledge and considerable experience.
Share