VMware ESXi Chronicles

As more of our customers start migrating from VMware ESX to ESXi, we would like to start showcasing some of their deployment experiences on this blog. We recently published a case study on the ESXi deployment of Kroll Ontrack, the world leader in providing legal technologies and data recovery products and services.

Kroll has been a long time user of VMware ESX, but for their latest virtualization project, they decided to deploy an embedded version of VMware ESXi due to its more reliable architecture and simpler management requirements such as less patching and faster provisioning.

“We chose ESXi to virtualize our file servers based on lessened patching requirements and the ability to get away from using hard drives in the servers,” says Joel Fuller, a technical architect at Kroll. “ESXi is very easy to configure and deploy. You basically take a USB key and push out a scripted configuration to it, and it’s done.”

With a goal of migrating 500 existing physical file servers, Kroll adhered to a schedule of converting approximately 15 file servers per week, with an additional 25 servers converted during monthly maintenance windows. Each file server is built from a template, making it quick and easy to provision new virtual machines. Kroll prepared PowerShell scripts to automate the rollout.

Kroll currently has 145 ESXi hosts, allowing them to consolidate 20 racks down to only 3. They are very satisfied with their ESXi rollout: “VMware ESXi lets us get more life out of our infrastructure while giving us a simpler and more secure operational model,” says Fuller. “That makes us a much more scalable organization.”

Read the full case study. If you have deployed ESXi, please let us know. We would love to feature you on our blog.

The ESX team