IDGC of Volga (Microsoft Exchange Server)

The continuity of supply with the electric power of end consumers of the Volga region substantially depends on operational interaction of all services of JSC IDGC of Volga company. To exclude a possibility of idle time in service of users, the JSC IDGC of Volga company implemented at the central office in Saratov a failover cluster based on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and unrolled on it business applications, including the server of e-mail Microsoft Exchange 2010.

The company highly appreciated project deliverables: the virtual environment created using Hyper-V and new management tools servers allowed to increase significantly the level of reliability of work of corporate applications and to simplify service of IT systems.

Situation

Managing backbone power transmission lines of big extent, the IDGC of Volga distribution company aims to provide regular power supply of end consumers. The stop of crucial business processes can create potential threat of violation of work of power supply of final customers - both the enterprises, and normal consumers of the electric power of regions of the Volga region.

The majority of business processes in the company are automated using information technologies. As program base for automation the Microsoft platform, in particular, an authentication system and access controls of Active Directory®, SQL Server® DBMS on the basis of which business applications function is used, the system of e-mail Exchange, etc. is unrolled.

Specialists of IT department of the company understood that not to allow business work violation, it is necessary to reduce as much as possible time of the planned and unplanned idle times of IT systems.

As the solution of this task the technology of a clustering of server roles and applications which is built in Windows Server 2003 – the server platform which was generally used at the enterprise was considered. However the complexity of deployment and management of similar clusters and also need of duplication of the equipment required for support of each klasterizuyemy service stopped IT department from broad application of this solution.

Remove these problems the technology of server virtualization which allows to place several isolated services in virtual machines on one server could help and if necessary to transfer these virtual machines to other hosts. It helps to avoid scheduled downtimes in holding time of physical servers and also as fast as possible to recover customer service at failure of the equipment.

"With a release of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 need of transition to a new system became obvious. Virtualization allowed us to provide the required high level of controllability of servers and fault tolerance of transactions and data, critical for business", - Bozhko Sergey Yuryevich, the head of department of IT infrastructure of department of UIRIT of JSC IDGC of Volga tells.

Solution

As means of virtualization Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor which is built in Windows Server 2008 R2 was selected: studying of a situation in the market showed that this product provides good performance and allows to unroll the virtualization clusters providing the high level of availability of virtual machines without additional costs.

"Our attention was paid at once to itself by the Live Migration function in Windows Server 2008 R2. It allows to transfer virtual machines in a virtualization cluster from one physical server to another. And what is important, it occurs imperceptibly for users, within literally several minutes", - Sergey Yuryevich Bozhko explains.

Serious argument for benefit of this solution was the fact that all server and user operating systems set prior to the beginning of the project at the customer and also many applications were products of Microsoft. IT administrators of IDGC of Volga were well familiar with technologies and products of this company, and transition to new versions did not require cardinal retraining of personnel.

The Tritec of Infosistems company, one of the largest system integrators to Volga federal district providing a full range of IT solutions and services for business automation was attracted to implementation of implementation.

As the first step the virtualization cluster with support of dynamic transfer of virtual machines (Live Migration) based on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 was unrolled. For implementation of migration of the existing services in virtual infrastructure and convenient centralized operation the environment of virtualization implemented the System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 system. Tens of physical servers ensuring functioning of key business and infrastructure applications were transferred to production virtual environment.

On replacement of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, functioning prior to the beginning of the project on 5 physical servers at the central office of the company in Saratov, the new version of Microsoft Exchange 2010 functioning in virtual environment is unrolled. For this application cast on servers (a transport role, a role of the router, client access, storage) is performed, migration of mailboxes is executed, planning of mail infrastructure counting on future interaction with production associations is implemented. One Microsoft Exchange 2010 selected for work the physical server executes a role of the boundary server: accepts and sends all mail to the organizations, checks all incoming mail for spam, viruses, for mail accessory to the registered users in the specific domain.

During the project products for management - System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2 and System Center Operations Manager 2007 were also unrolled. With their help monitoring of the existing servers for failure prediction of software and the equipment is carried out, configuration management and changes is exercised.

"Microsoft System Center Operations Manager provides the convenient working panel of the administrator allowing to trace quickly the critical information", - Olga Artemyeva, the system administrator of Tritec of Infosistems LLC notes.

Except optimization of service of a server framework, the products System Center are used also for centralized operation by workstations, allow to solve problems of users far off. It considerably saves time of IT specialists, releasing it for development of IT infrastructure.

"Users did not even notice the moment of transition to a cluster, everything occurred quickly and without interruption in work. But the IT personnel noted that using a cluster and means of System Center administration of the new Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010 servers became much simpler and more effective", - Sergey Yuryevich Bozhko told.

Advantages

Advantages from the executed project can be separated into three categories:

• Implementation of virtualization allows to save on acquisition of new physical servers considerably. The number of virtual machines per physical host without the resources selected with each virtual machine is about 8:1 already now. In 2010 at the expense of this project in management personnel of IDGC of Volga did without purchase of additional servers at rather big increase in volume of solvable tasks. Moreover, without serious consequences brought about 20 percent of "obsolete" servers out of work. At the same time the power reserve of servers of virtualization will allow to continue to unroll the new services necessary to business, without buying the additional hardware. Taking into account emergence of dynamic memory allocation in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 in the company are going to increase this digit up to 10 or 12:1.
• Implementation of a cluster of virtualization allowed to reach high availability of the services started in virtual machines and to a minimum to reduce possible idle times in service of users, even at failure of the server hardware.

"Now, when in IDGC of Volga will unroll a failover cluster based on Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, in case of refusal one of physical servers, virtual machines which on it were started will be almost instantly moved per other working hosts. They can also be transferred manually if on one of machines it is required to carry out scheduled works, for example, to set the requiring updating resets. And it does not lead to a stop of virtual machines and a break in service of users", - Alexey Sorokov, the head of software sales department, Tritec of Infosistems LLC emphasized.

Implementation of the centralized control system based on the products System Center considerably simplified work of IT specialists due to automation of routine tasks, possibilities of pro-active detection of problems in performance of systems and potential faults. On average time for service of one service was reduced by 50%. It allows specialists of IT department to give more time to development of IT of the enterprise, thereby doing business more technological and successful.