System Replacement

Our customer

Family business providing contact lenses to independent practitioners.

The Challenge

Provide appropriate system in order to run new SAP system and on premise Exchange Server. Migrate existing data to new system.

Downtime to be kept to a minimum

Proposal

To provide 4 new Hyper-V virtual servers on single physical Dell hardware. Backup all servers and all data to cloud with an internal RD1000 drive as a failsafe.

Provide separate domain controller, data server, Exchange server and SQL server.

Migrate all data to new servers then configure cloud and on premise backups

Solution

Using Dell PowerEdge Server Flex IT created a host server using Windows Server 2012 R2. Then created and configured 4 Hyper-V virtual servers. Domain controller, Data, Exchange and SQL.

Once configured the first task was to migrate the domain controller roles and transfer the data. The roles were migrated whilst on site and then data transfer was scripted to run over night, ensuring no downtime for the users. 

The users were able to carry on using their current applications on the existing server whilst having domain functions such as DHCP and DNS as well as the office data provided by new servers.

The next stage was migrating all other domain roles and printers, then migrating the mailboxes from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2013.

The mail migration was done out of hours, again to minimise downtime for the users. This was completed successfully with all legacy mail made available and all new mail held at the new continuity service provided by Proofpoint until the new mail server was ready to accept mail.

The next part was configuring the new SQL server in order to provide the SAP application and database.

Flex worked with SAP engineers in order to configure the disk array and SQL to the specification required.  

Finally, the backup was configured using Veeam software. A daily snapshot full system backup of all virtual servers is configured to cloud storage alongside a bare metal recovery backup to include the physical host to removable drive.

FlexIT installed our original server in 2009 and continue to provide us with IT support.  Following a planned system upgrade we asked FlexIT to come up with a proposal to cope with our current infrastructure and take on the addition of SAP.  FlexIT installed the new servers with minimal disruption to our daily routines and gave us confidence during installation with communication of all the steps they took.