From VMware Workstation to a vCenter cluster
A growing precision engineering company moved 65 virtual machines from standalone hosts to a vCenter cluster, so a hardware fault no longer stops production.
Context
An industry and precision engineering company was growing. Its 65 virtual machines ran on six standalone Windows Server 2016 hosts under VMware Workstation, with storage on ageing Synology units and disks attached directly to the hosts.
Constraint
Each host was a single point of failure: a hardware fault on one of them stopped the production machines it carried. Several Windows servers were also out of support. Production had to keep running during the move.
What we did
- Designed a VMware vSphere cluster managed by vCenter, on a new HP Fibre Channel SAN installed by the client’s own team.
- Moved the virtual machines from the standalone hosts into the cluster.
- Replaced the out-of-support Windows servers with two Linux servers.
Result
A hardware fault on one host no longer stops production, and the unsupported Windows servers are gone. The cluster brought yearly licence costs, where the old setup ran on licences already paid for: the company chose resilience over that saving.
Stack
VMware vSphere and vCenter, HP Fibre Channel SAN, Linux, Windows Server.