by: VMware VP of Engineering Huseyin Dursun
To learn how VMware IT implemented a resilient infrastructure across VMware’s remote offices, read the blog: Deploying a Resilient Infrastructure for Core Services at Remote Offices.
One of the challenges when a company grows is making the user experience as consistent as possible across different offices. We had a major challenge given that VMware has grown fast organically and through acquisitions. Network connections were becoming one of the most critical services in the office.
Recently, IT undertook a project to increase usability and consistency across the network experience. For a typical office network, multiple functions need to be provided such as DHCP, DNS, Proxy, Firewall, VPN, Active Directory, etc. All these services need to be highly reliable for the office to function. A resilient architecture and infrastructure is needed to support this.
IT needs to deploy redundant compute/network/storage to build a resilient infrastructure. If we use the traditional model, the acquisition cost is prohibitive, and the management cost is high. When we began, VMware was introducing vSAN and VxRail, a joint hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) product with Dell EMC. Since then, we have also added Dell EMC VMware vSAN Ready Nodes as an option. Both appliances have been easy to deploy, upgrade, and support. So far, we have deployed these appliances in most of our offices, with project completion scheduled for the end of 2018.
In addition to deploying these resilient appliances, we also have designed our services in such a way that an appliance failure at a particular office will not have an impact to the services in that particular office. The appliance from a nearby office can support this office should there be a failure. Implementation details are provided in part two of this blog, Deploying a Resilient Infrastructure for Core Services at Remote Offices.
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