Background
The current infrastructure environment that UBC IT supports is complex and difficult to properly manage. The environment consists of more than 475 hardware devices from a variety of vendors and utilizes a wide variety of operating systems. Much of the infrastructure is also aging and heroic efforts are frequently required to maintain it. Implementing Virtual Server Services will help in addressing these issues.
Purpose
To design an architecture that provides UBC IT with the capacity for hosting Virtual Servers. The vision for this project is to develop Virtual Server Services as a commodity to sell, with a goal of providing 80% of the commodity services on campus.
To achieve this goal the architecture design must be scalable. Similar to UBC’s network model, the key success factors are:
- standardization
- self-management capabilities
Applying this model suggests Virtual Servers can be provisioned with standard configurations and a limited number of operating systems. This will be done in a manner that gives more flexibility and allows self-management for departments where possible, so departmental administrators and researchers have some level of control over their own Virtual Server environments.
Scope
The infrastructure for the Virtual Server Services is complete and progress is underway to consolidate servers and migrate services to the new architecture. This will simplify the on-going maintenance and support of the diverse environment outlined above.
