Over the last weekend we migrated our first customer VPS from VMware ESX 3.5 to Hyper-V 2008R2.
This is a significant milestone as it signifies the start of winding down VMware for customer servers. All new VM’s or VPS’s have been provisioned on Hyper-V (controlled by Service Centre Virtual Machine Manager, in a HA cluster) since 2010.
All our own servers have also been migrated to Hyper-V with the exception of Exchange 2007 which is now winding down due to the launch of Exchange 2010.
For the first time we can say our standby diesel generator was used in anger over the weekend.
A 50 minute power cut in Holbrook caused the standby generator at the Sheffield Data Centre to fully take the load during the blackout. Redundant power and other emergency systems ensured colocation racks stayed on, and no colo customers suffered any downtime.
The generator Automatic Transfer Switch and failover systems worked perfectly!
There was an issue with one UPS which tripped (the UPS pending new batteries, a victim of bad timing – now fixed, see other blog posts), which caused a VMware node and 3 switches to reboot. We attended site, restarted the affected node and rebalanced the cluster manually. Some other Virtual Private Servers were restarted as a precaution due to network inter-dependancies.
Health Checks were done on all VMware and Hyper-V nodes, as well as visual inspections of each rack.
The UPS batteries in Rack 2 were replaced this morning at 06:30, no downtime.
As a precaution, and because of a VMware node rebooting on Saturday, we paused some Virtual Private Servers while we swapped the batteries incase of another failover. Fortunately no failover happened and all customers servers remained online.
Today we successfully migrated a test CentOS5.5 Linux server, and a Windows 2008R2 Web Edition server from VMware ESX to Microsoft Hyper-V.
Once the VMDK’s had been migrated to Service Center Virtual Machine Manager, we were able to change the hardware template, install the Linux Integration Components (or Windows IC’s) and deploy the server to the Live Hyper-V cluster.
No major issues were observed, and both the Linux and Windows servers seem to be faster on Hyper-V!
We’re planning to repeat the testing several more times (with test servers) before finalising a VMware to Hyper-V migration plan for later in the year.
We hope to have remove the legacy VMware ESX / ESXi platform from live service by the end of the year.
(Sheffield Data Centre, Cloud VM Hosting)
Firstly, Happy New Year to everyone!
2010 was a great year for High Availability Hosting limited, with a huge increase in customer orders, over double 2009’s revenue for colocation, growth in Virtual Dedicated Servers, and significant improvements in the infrastructure at the Sheffield Data Centre – including the go-live of the diesel generator, cooling system refit, and increased network capacity.
2011 is set to be our best year yet, building on the growth experienced in 2010.
2011 projects
Here’s a sneak preview of the projects planned for 2011:
There’s probably more little projects on the list that have been missed off, but you get the idea – it’s going to be another busy year for us!
3rd birthday
It’s also HA’s 3rd birthday this February, we’re planning an Open Day for the Sheffield Data Centre, where people can come and meet us, see the Data Centre and chat about our services, as well as witness a generator fail-over. No date has been decided yet, but it’ll be sometime in February!
We’re also planning some special offers and discounts for new customers who sign up in February.
Watch this space for more news, and have a prosperous new year!!!
:-)
We’re changing how we deploy Managed Firewalls for customers at the Sheffield Data Centre. The current VMware appliance Managed Firewalls are based pfSense 1.2.3, which is now getting old and doesn’t update as easily as we’d like.
So we’ve been working with the latest build of Monowall 1.31 (which pfSense is based on), and devising a new standard config for Managed Firewalls. Today we built the fist customer firewall based on this new template.
Advantages to the Monowall based appliance include:
We’re planning to move the existing Managed Firewalls onto a new VMware cluster early next year and migrate them to Monowall. Customers with simple NAT rules will be migrated first, with customers with VPN’s and more complicated rulesets migrated towards the end of Q2 2011. We’ll let individual customers know in advance.
We’re also standardising on 1:1 NAT translations, and will work with customers to change their rules accordingly as we migrate firewalls.
17/06/2010 04:30 – SharePoint is now back online. Due to issues moving the master config databases to a different SQL installation, plus issues installing a SharePoint rollup patch we have decided to roll-back all changes made by un-doing the VMware snapshot. No data was damaged and SharePoint is back as it was before the change started. We’ll review the data we collected and re-attempt the upgrade soon.
Due to an outage last night at our previous colocation provider (one of many outages this year), we took the business decision to move our exising servers and SAN storage early into the Sheffield Data Centre.
The following services are now fully colocated within the Sheffield Data Centre:
All services were successfully migrated for 03:00 this morning (1st July), and DNS started to propagate quickly. We worked through the night to ensure all applications were working post-migration.
We apologise for any inconvienience this may have caused (especially with slow DNS propagation beyond our control).
- Stuart.
It’s with delightful pleasure we announce the first customer has moved servers into the Sheffield Data Centre. A local web hosting company occupied “Rack 3″ yesterday and their kit is now live on the Internet.
We are now accepting orders and inviting customers to colocate kit with us. Current lead-times on half and full racks are around 5 working days. Single rack servers can be moved in immediately.
(All prices are ex-VAT)
Another 8 racks were delivered yesterday, with another 4 due either today or Monday. Cabling works on these racks will begin straight away.
Our VMware Dedicated Server platform (www.hahosting.com), and our Web & hosted Exchange platform (www.thevirtualcloud.com), will be moved from the current colocation providers to the Sheffield Data Centre in early July.
The construction of the Sheffield Data Centre is split over 3 phases, with phase 1 is now complete. The next phase will see the backup generator installed; final project plans for this will be drawn up in July. Phase 3 (FM200 fire suppression) will be later in the year.
The web site will be updated over the weekend, but you can take this as official that we are open for business.
Contact us on 0114 228 0022 or sales@sheffielddatacentre now!
If you’re looking for a fully managed server rather than rack space – why not look at our VMware Hosted Dedicated Servers.
From just £59 per month, including:
Servers run on a high availability VMware cluster – so in the unlikely event of hardware failure your server will reboot on different hardware – eliminating downtime caused by hardware faults.
We also provide and manage the Operating System licence, choose from Windows 2003 / 2008, CentOS, RedHat, and Solaris.
All your data is stored on SAN storage with redundant volumes and standby disks.
For more information, and to order online, head over to:
t: 0114 228 0022
f: 0845 867 6660
e: email sales
e: email support
w: online form
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