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Donet VIP Paradigm

Posted on December 22, 2010 by Eric Wright0 Comments

In recent months we have completed several projects incorporating customer’s existing directory services (Active Directory Domain Services) with our VIP services. This allows VIP instances hosted at Donet to co-exist with, or completely host, your corporate infrastructure servers that you use for day to day operations. We would like to elaborate on such a project that Donet has recently completed.

Company X Introduction
The company in question, henceforth referred to as Company X, possessed several servers at their location in an IT closet that housed networking equipment/servers. Having these servers on-site took up valuable office space, increased electricity consumption, and required Company X to employ a consulting service for server maintenance and repair. The servers were considered a liability as they were a single point of failure and they proved to be a headache to most.

Infrastructure Migration Plan
Company X’s infrastructure included Blackberry Enterprise Server, Microsoft Exchange 2003, File/Print Services, DHCP Server, Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains 2010, and a Microsoft SQL Server. The project consisted of migrating all services on the physical servers to newly created VIP instances at Donet.

Migration Details
The first part of the process consisted of networking configuration. In this scenario, since Company X utilized Donet for their pipe to the internet, we patched a VLAN behind their firewall and trunked it to our VIP infrastructure, allowing the VIP instances to communicate on their private network. If you do not have internet connectivity through Donet, do not worry, we can configure a VPN tunnel to allow private networks to communicate.

Donet then created the VIP instances, promoted them as domain controllers, and installed the new applications (SQL Server 2008 R2, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, etc.). All of the installation and configuration was performed without incurring downtime on the existing infrastructure.

Shortly following was the data/service migrations to the newly created VIP instances, which unfortunately required downtime. However, in many instances, the migration can be performed without downtime for your company. This depends on the applications and data involved.

Lastly, cleanup of the domain took place to remove the old servers. All of the functions of the legacy infrastructure has been migrated to the VIP instances.

Conclusion
Every infrastructure is unique as every company is unique. The migration process may vary from that above, but Donet has the staff and infrastructure to provide an IT solution that is ideal for your corporation. In many cases the solution is similar to that outlined, allowing Donet to worry about your infrastructure, and allowing you to get back to business.