Milestone 1 - Server Readiness

Installation of 12 Node All Flash Hyper Converged Server with Disaster Recovery

Fiji National University (FNU) had most of the servers operating on IBM BladeCenter H Chassis connected to DS3900 series SAN. Other Critical Servers were operating on Dell VRTX converged servers as well as many other rack mount servers. Almost all server had reached end of life and there were active risks of service outages as well as frequent hardware related issues.

The restoration of services previously used to take tremendous amount of time. With FNU just beginning its 20 million Fijian dollar ERP project, and replacing all its legacy applications, it required robust and fast networking and server with equally good backup and replication technology.

Project Objectives

The objectives of this project were to:

• Implement 6x Lenovo SR650 Hyperconverged Servers with Mellanox switch and Rubrik Backup Appliance at production site.
• Implement the exact replica of the solution at the DR site.
• Implement and Configure VMWARE vCenter, vSphere, vROPS & vSAN.
• Install and configure Veeam Replication and Veeam Orchestrator
• Provide As Build Documentations.
• Create VM's required for Banner Non Production Environment and grant necessary privileges. 
• Create user accounts and provide VPN access to Ellucian consultants.

Project Implementation Methodology – Essential to Quality Success

1. Verification and validation of Bill of Materials.

Once the equipment’s arrived, all equipment’s were tested for any Dead-on-Arrival and fault related cases. This assisted FNU in working with the supplier to revalidate the Bill of Materials and identify and glitches in solutions design.

2. Planning Workshop

A preplanning workshop was conducted to prepare the implementation plan. This allowed bringing everyone under one roof and agreeing on the implementations plan.

3. Implementation

The existing infrastructure was verified against its as built and removed carefully. The new set of hardware were then installed at a collocated location.

The implementation duration was compact and there were issues between Mellanox Switch and Intel LOM Modules on Lenovo chassis. It demanded the entire team to work in synchronized coordination to ensure deliverables can be achieved within time and cost with expected quality.

The entire project implementation was done in two weeks only and is an achievement for such project size.