Virtualisation of Legacy Servers ManConsulting are pleased to announce the successful completion of a major project for 22 properties of a major European Hotel and Leisure Chain. The Problem: - The PMS is locked to a unsupported OS running on unsupported and past end of life hardware. The PMS is needed 24x7 for the running of the hotel and needs to be accessed for historical guest data.
- The legacy servers are becoming increasingly unreliable and failure is becoming imminent.
- Years of additions to the PMS have left each property with unique and hard to support configurations and increased instability of the PMS itself.
The Solution: - The whole server was virtualised and placed on modern, supported hardware thus removing the dependency of legacy servers and failing array's.
- The virtualised OS was cleanly reinstalled and standardised removing site specific and hard to support configurations which were no longer needed but inherited from previous infrastructure configurations.
- The virtualised machine and clean virtual OS are more reliable, no longer imminently failing and on vendor supported hardware.
- The legacy systems are now in a position to be duplicated and run in parallel in order to upgrade the PMS to the newer product with the smoothest possible transition and without loss of data or revenue.
- Further legacy PC's also tied into the PMS were also provided as Virtual machines, thus simplifying infrastructure and support even further.
Additional Benefits - As a result of the virtualisation several previous long, regular tasks have been reduced significantly.
- Night Audits have been reduced in some cases from 4-5 hours to 30 minutes (including user interaction)
- The opportunity was taken in reconfiguration to make the online back-ups automatic as part of the process.
- Previous disk space limitations on the aging Novell server is all but removed whilst also moving all network storage onto off-site backup.
- Dependency of key-cutting to a single physical PC was removed.
Using the advanced virtualisation technology from VMware allowed the obsolete Physical servers to be virtualised. Technology Links... Click here for an OverView of VMWare® Virtualisation Technologies
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