The OIT Infrastructure Team has completed the deployment of our new VMWare VXRail cluster. Virtualized servers have been widely utilized by OIT for many years, providing essential services with less configuration time and hardware overhead, and this newly implemented cluster will further improve the efficient deployment and administration of virtual servers.
During the project, 468 virtual servers were migrated from our legacy cluster in the University Data Center to a new Dell VXRail HCI (Hyper Converged Infrastructure) with VMWare’s vSAN, which is a form of local shared storage. Following the move, noticeable differences have been observed in resource performance, while the number of host servers has been reduced by half, providing additional cost and energy savings.
This project serves as an important landmark in our efforts to modernize SMU’s virtual server infrastructure, and it opens the door for further development on our VMWare roadmap. Many thanks to OIT staffers Rhonda Slack, Randy Preston, and the entire project team for completing this project ahead of schedule!
