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.
