Our Lady of Consolation Aged Care implement Microsoft Hyper-V high availability solution

29 November 2010

In anticipation of upgrading some of their core enterprise applications in 2011, Our Lady of Consolation Aged Care Services (OLOC) needed to expand the capacity of their server infrastructure.

OLOC were already familiar with the benefits of server virtualisation. The existing servers were implemented in 2006, and utilised Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 to allow consolidation of 8 virtual servers to run on just two physical host servers. Therefore it was logical to look to a Microsoft Hyper-V solution for the new server infrastructure.

Expanded capacity is not the only benefit OLOC will yield from the new infrastructure. An iSCSI network storage appliance was also implemented to leverage Hyper-V's Live Migration and Cluster Shared Volumes features. These features provide high-availability and improved load balancing capabilities for OLOC's new server infrastructure.

The surprisingly cost-effective solution utilised the following rack mounted hardware:

John Crnogorac (General Manager of Intense Technology) was responsible for implementing the solution, and had this to say about the implementation.

"For anyone with prior experience implementing Hyper-V and iSCSI storage, Hyper-V's high availability features are remarkably easy to implement. Having prior experience with iSCSI multi path I/O solutions probably made the process somewhat easier for me, but there are plenty of resources available on the web which step you through the various processes.
"Testing the Live-Migration feature for the first time was an awesome experience; Server Admins will love this feature. The automatic failover also worked perfectly, though I trust with the Intel servers we've implemented this feature won't be exercised outside of testing!
"Craig (our Managing Director) was particularly impressed by Hyper-V's Cluster Shared Volumes. Traditionally, SAN LUNs are dedicated to one server. But Hyper-V's Cluster Shared Volumes work with the iSCSI storage to allow multiple Hyper-V host servers to have access to the same LUN. This makes it possible to migrate live VM's from one Hyper-V host to another which is ideal for load-balancing Hyper-V hosts memory and processor workloads."

For more information about the technologies utilised in this solution, refer: