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