The St. Petersburg subway upgraded the IT infrastructure

The increased loads of the KAS DU servers (growth of number of the connected objects, increase in number of users), and also need of replacement of an obsolete equipment, demanded upgrade of the existing park of the KAS DU servers. After the analysis of modern technologies the decision on creation of the KAS DU server complex using technology of virtualization was made.

OLLI company suggested to solve this problem transfer of old servers to virtual environment where it is possible to increase very quickly resources if these servers lack them. Also infrastructure will receive fault tolerance and high availability of the tasks which are carried out by these virtual servers unlike what was before. Plus - an infrastructure basis for future tasks.

The subway set specific purposes for OLLI company:

• Decrease in direct costs of the maintenance of the park of servers due to virtualization and consolidation of outdated servers and applications on the new high-performance hardware.
• Decrease in indirect (operational) charges of the park of servers, such, as: the used area, power supply of servers, conditioning, administration, reservation due to reduction of number of physical servers.
• Effective use of computing resources due to consolidation of servers and virtualization of hardware.
• Increase in availability of servers and applications due to creation of clusters of high availability and dynamic balancing of loading of servers.
• Increase in fault tolerance of servers.
• Reliability augmentation of data storage due to use of the flexible scheme of backup.
• Reduction of time and cost of creation/delivery of servers under new tasks.

The virtualization complex including the following components was developed for the solution of effective objectives:

• the software package of virtualization on the basis of VMware Sphere 5.0 consisting of the server of management VMwarevCenterServer and hypervisors of ESXi set on edges. The software of vSphere allowed to organize a cluster of high availability and provided balancing of loading (HA and DRS).
• servers with virtualization support
• storage area network (SAN, Storage Area Network)
• storage system (SS)
• Automated workplaces with the web browser, the client of Telnet/SSH, VMwarevCLI/PowerCLI and/or VMwarevSphereClient

Part of a complex on which virtual machines are turned consists of three IBM HS22 blade servers placed in the IBM BladeCenter H chassis. Data of virtual machines are placed on a failsafe storage system of IBM DS3500 equipped with the duplicated controllers, power supplies and channels of connection of servers and disk baskets. For ensuring failsafe access of servers to DWH and a factory area network in the chassis the duplicated Ethernet and SAN switches are installed. Also the chassis contains 4 power supplies and 2 modules of cooling (blower) for working off of failure of power supply and cooling of servers.

Using a virtualization complex which was offered by OLLI company the following advantages were got:

• transfer of old servers to virtual environment, where an opportunity in the shortest possible time to increase resources if already available servers lack them.
• fault tolerance and high availability of the tasks which are carried out by these servers.
• infrastructure basis for future tasks.