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Johnson’s Construction Limited safeguards its business from costly downtime by implementing StarWind Virtual SAN based high availability cluster

July 27, 2023
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Jason Earle
IT Systems Administrator. Boasts nearly a decade of experience in managing and troubleshooting computer hardware, coupled with a background in computer-aided design (CAD) and tool & die.
IT Systems Administrator. Boasts nearly a decade of experience in managing and troubleshooting computer hardware, coupled with a background in computer-aided design (CAD) and tool & die.

CHALLENGE

Before StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) deployment, Johnsons Construction Limited had an IT infrastructure consisting of five physical servers running a total of eleven Hyper V virtual machines, with three of the physical servers hosting these virtual machines.

The company’s primary goal was to establish a highly available failover Hyper V cluster and storage solution. However, its existing infrastructure posed a significant challenge: Microsoft Server 2012 R2 allowed it to create a failover cluster for the Hyper V machines but did not support failover for the file server hosting the Hyper V disks. This created a single point of failure that could potentially result in catastrophic downtime.

Does StarWind satisfy all the requirements? Absolutely. It has been tested several times with power failures and server crashes and has successfully rolled over to the operating server to avoid any downtime.

Jason Earle, IT Systems Administrator

SOLUTION

With StarWind VSAN, Johnson’s Construction Limited successfully established a two-node cluster, incorporating a highly available failover file server and Hyper-V cluster. This innovative setup effectively eliminated any single point of failure. The company conducted thorough testing, subjecting the system to power failures and server crashes, and in each instance, StarWind VSAN seamlessly rolled over to the operating server, guaranteeing uninterrupted service. The implementation of StarWind VSAN has brought an end to downtime and created a robust, reliable, and highly available IT environment.

About the Company
Johnson's Construction Ltd. is a longstanding civil infrastructure company in Newfoundland and Labrador with a large workforce. The company has been involved in the heavy civil infrastructure business for over 30 years.
Location
NA (North America) (United States)
Industry
Construction, Engineering
Product
StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN)
Inspired by Jason Earle’s success? Want to improve business continuity for your business-critical apps and services?
Dmytro Malynka StarWind Virtual SAN Product Manager
We’ve got you covered! StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) is specifically designed to provide highly-available shared storage for Hyper-V, vSphere, and KVM clusters. With StarWind VSAN, simplicity is key: utilize the local disks of your hypervisor hosts and create shared HA storage for your VMs. Interested in learning more? Book a short StarWind VSAN demo now and see it in action!