Johannesburg, 18 Aug 2009
The South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) has achieved proactive, simplified management of its virtual environment by implementing VMware VirtualCenter software from Faritec, to improve its administrative, provisioning and monitoring capabilities. A JSE-listed IT solutions and services specialist, as well as a VMware partner, Faritec has worked closely with SAQA over the past 10 years.
Dr Herman Ohlhoff, IT Director of SAQA, says: “There is no doubt that VMware is the way to go. In a medium-sized organisation such as SAQA, you simply can't go wrong with a virtualised environment. I have been down the more traditional hardware deployment road, and VMware is miles ahead.”
SAQA is mandated by Parliament to oversee the further development and implementation of South Africa's National Qualifications Framework (NQF). The authority is tasked with ensuring that South Africa has a national education and training system, which provides quality learning, is responsive to the ever-changing influences of the external environment, and promotes the development of a nation that is committed to lifelong learning.
Created in response to these demands, the NQF provides a framework within which the South African qualifications system is constructed, representing a national effort at integrating education and training. Because of SAQA's demanding and high-profile role, its board took a decision to acquire an IT infrastructure that could be readily expanded to meet the needs of the 140 employees working at its Pretoria-based offices.
Ian Russell, Faritec's Technical Specialist: IBM, says SAQA's existing virtualised Linux-based environment had become fraught with complications and reliability issues. “We had a longstanding partnership relationship with SAQA for support of its IBM domain,” he says.
“When this problem arose, we proposed implementing VMWare VirtualCenter to allow SAQA to add new virtual servers easily and proactively manage the virtual environment from one central point.”
Consequently, SAQA decided to implement VMware ESXi, the free entry-level software, on a trial basis. The improvement was immediate, and the decision was therefore made to establish a more permanent relationship with VMware through Faritec.
“We deployed VMware VirtualCenter 2 and VMware ESXi in SAQA's NEC Quad Core server environment, which includes an IBM System x server and a 10 Terabyte shared storage environment,” Russell says.
“The software was loaded in one afternoon, and we converted one of SAQA's machines to a virtual server. Within a day, SAQA's IT staff had been empowered to create and manage the environment internally.”
Commenting on the benefits of the new VMware environment, Dr Ohlhoff mentions the quick time to deploy a virtual server as well as improved management and monitoring of SAQA's virtual server environment.
“Within an hour the software was loaded and we started adding virtual servers to our environment,” says Dr Ohlhoff. “We can monitor the performance of each of our 10 virtual servers on a minute-by-minute basis from a centralised point. This in turn mitigates the need to physically check each server in a data centre or deploy complex remote monitoring software.”
In addition, SAQA now has a solid, redundant and stable environment with three VMware hosts, one of which is idle for redundancy purposes. In the months since deploying VMware VirtualCenter, the authority has experienced almost no downtime. On the single occasion when one of the hosts went down, SAQA simply restarted that host's virtual servers on the spare host, which took only a matter of minutes.
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