SCRAP of Microsoft Hyper-V

Description of a situation

SKRAP group - the supplier more than 7000 names of consumer goods which implementation is made through large multiformat retail networks. And the adjusted sales channels demand partnership with large networks from the company of the high and accurate organization of all business operations including in work of a warehouse. For automation of warehouse processes in the company a WMS system was implemented, and the uninterrupted operation of its work is crucial for activity of all company.

Project Tasks

The SKRAP group predicted growth, but faced that IT infrastructure could not provide the increasing requirements of the company for free resources: the growing databases of the WMS system and 1C: Trade Management required more resources and the number of the servers servicing databases. All these factors caused serious concerns for stability of work of these applications, important for the company.

Also should solve these tasks the attracted integrator – Soft management companies.

Project Progress

First of all audit of software and the equipment and the analysis of infrastructure was booked. Were by results revealed:

• the shortage of computing powers and memory were caused by uneven load distribution between the hardware;
• all important applications were placed on physical servers. At the output of the server out of operation, the applications located on it long time were unavailable. When carrying out software maintenance and the equipment the stop of their work was required;
• question of safety of the WMS and 1S databases in the company decided using mirroring. But at failure of WMS of recovery of databases there was insufficiently.

The main objective of the project consisted in increase in fault tolerance of a WMS system. Taking into account all technical aspects creation of virtual environment was the most optimal method for the solution of this task. As a basis of virtualization the Hyper-V server platform was selected. As one of arguments for benefit of the choice of the solution the fact that on hand the customer had licenses for Windows server 2012 R2 served. With their help it was possible to implement the project, without encumbering the company with additional costs on purchase of the software.

Results

The technology of virtualization helped to solve not only the main objective of the project, but also caused some other positive changes in management and service of infrastructure of SKRAP Group.

Creation of several virtual machines in the environment of Hyper-V allowed to increase fault tolerance both WMS programs, and the 1C: Trade Management applications, with the databases corresponding to them.

After failure from mirroring of SQL databases for benefit of virtual environment at "SCRAPS" free server resources were formed. It gave the chance for flexible management as capacities of virtual servers, and for redistribution and balancing of loading between servers physical. There was an opportunity to select the isolated environment for programmers under development and testing.

"The new environment gives the chance to flexibly test a set of options of configurations for optimal work of all structure of 1C." - Boykov Pavel Aleksandrovich, the system administrator of SKRAP Group comments.-"The Hyper-V system helped to provide growth of the company due to implementation of new virtual servers and without additional expenditure for the expensive equipment."

Creation of virtual environment allowed to eliminate all inconveniences connected with maintenance of infrastructure. Now necessary software updating and scheduled maintenance of the hardware can be carried out without stopping applications.