Server and Storage Provisioning

Server and Storage Provisioning

Standard Hardware Specification

Virtual Servers are configured with the following hardware specification by default:

• 1 CPU
• 2 GB RAM
• 10GB System Disk and 50GB additional disk

Servers are provisioned with a 10GB system disk and 50GB additional disk by default. Additional space can be requested on the second disk and will incur additional cost. It is considered best practice to install applications on a separate disk to the operating system.

Standard Server will be priced at €1,400 per unit, once off charge.

Information Solutions and Services can offer as an option, OS System Administration (Windows and Linux) and monitoring of your virtual machine. Monitoring alerting mechanisms will follow standard Information Solutions and Services practice and will be defined during set-up phase of the System Administration service. Maintenance tasks included are as follows:

• University standard anti-virus software and updates
• Operating System security patches
• Operating System fault tracking and troubleshooting
• Backup client upgrades
• Disk Defragmentation

To request the optional monitoring and maintenance service, specify this when requesting your server. Alternatively, you may request this service at any time by opening a ticket with the Service Desk. The service is charged at €100 per month per server.

Additional CPUs, memory and hard disk space can be facilitated upon request, but will incur additional costs.

Mirroring 

Information Solutions and Services provides two storage configuration options; mirrored and not mirrored. Mirrored storage replicates data in real time between two Data Centres, for intermediate disaster recovery. This feature provides a highly available and resilient environment.

Additional Storage (No Mirroring)

Additional Storage (Mirrored)

• Tier 1 storage is most suitable for high speed online transactional type applications, for example high speed transactional databases. Note, such application are not normally suitable for virtualized machines and this storage is normally allocated to SAN-attached physical machines. 
• Tier 2 is a compromise of transactional speed vs. affordability. This is the main storage medium on which the virtual machines and their storage will reside. Suitable for high capacity medium throughput databases such as Microsoft Exchange. 
• Tier 3 storage is most suitable for use as a traditional file server data repository and archiving of high data volume low transactional volume applications such as image storing.

Additional CPUs 

Up to three additional CPUs can be provisioned and are charged as follows: 

• One additional CPU - €500 
• Two additional CPUs - €750 
• Three additional CPUs - €1,250

Additional Memory 

Additional Memory can be provisioned. Total memory is charged as follows: 

• 4 GB - €500
• 6 GB - €750 
• 12 GB - €1,750
• 16 GB - €2,500 
• 24 GB - €3,250 
• 32 GB - €4,000

Charges are incurred in order to maintain resource availability i.e. fund the scaling of the virtual server and SAN environment according to ’dynamic’ requirements rather than fixed cycle funding allocations. Charge amounts are subject to change.

Standard Network Configuration - Internal or External Access 

The default network configuration is internal access. This means that the server will reside the University’s internal network and be available to internal NUIG users only. No remote access from outside NUIG will be available for these servers. Servers with external access requirements will reside in a secure DMZ network. Such servers will be exposed to all the vagaries of the public internet. The list of ports open on the DMZ is included in the Firewall Ports section. Support requirements for external facing servers will be significantly higher as a result if the server and their data are to remain secure. All OS and application support is the responsibility of the customer.

Server Provisioning 

Information Solutions and Services currently support the following provisioning services:

New Windows 2003 or Linux Virtual Server 

The base OS will be installed and configured using standard defined templates. Memory, CPU & Hard Disk space will be allocated based on the standard hardware specification. System Administration support and maintenance of the base OS and installed applications is the sole responsibility of the customer. Information Solutions and Services will provide health monitoring of the Production server environment only. Information Solutions and Services, can on request implement alerts on Production Servers, for virtual hardware resource, OS and application parameters. Please contact the Service Desk to open a ticket with the required details.

Physical to Virtual Conversion (P2V) 

The P2V service is a mechanism to convert a physical server to a virtual server. The technical overview of the service provisioning is based on a highly available SAN and VMwareinfrastructure. The P2V process is a mechanism in which a physical server running with an Intel CPU is converted to be virtual server. P2V requests will be performed in two phases. The initial phase will be a one hour consultation to validate whether the P2V process will be possible. The second phase will be performing the actual P2V process on the server. IP addressing and storage requirements will be discussed as part of the initial consultation.

This service requires the assistance of our VMware vendor. A quotation will be generated following the technical overview. Generally, costs will be minimal for standard operating systems that are supported natively by VMware. Additional costs will normally be incurred when the need to overcome complexities associated with virtualising non-standard operating systems (such as NT or a particular flavour of Linux) and server configurations.

A standard P2V request matches the following criteria:

• Windows 2000 or Windows 2003
• Approx 100GB of data
• 1-2 CPUs
• 2-4GB RAM

Virtual Server and Storage Provisioning Overview