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Infrastructure & Storage Assessment

BUILDING THE RIGHT FOUNDATION

Infrastructures can be complex, multi-layered, with many dependencies overlapping each other in a number of ways. Even with virtualization helping reduce these complexities, it's critical that you build upon a solid foundation of hardware and software components configured and designed using industry best-practices to provide you the solid and reliable results you need to run your business applications.

VeriStor provides a comprehensive Infrastructure & Storage Assessment service that provides an overall "health-check" of your environment to help you validate your existing infrastructure and ensure that its optimized for best performance as well as meeting industry best-practices around availability and redundancy. This helps ensure that you can continue to scale and grow your infrastructure in the most efficient and cost-effective way.

ASSESSMENT SERVICES

Our Infrastructure & Storage Assessment service is designed to cover the primary core components of your infrastructure. We deliver this assessment to you in a report that provides critical information on the overall status and "health" of your environment based on industry best-practices along with our real-world experience and expertise we've gained across the hundreds of customers we support today.

As part of this service offering, we cover the following major areas:

> VMware vSphere & vCenter

  • Conduct assessment of existing VMware vSphere & vCenter infrastructure components to gather inventory, configuration and usage information
  • Conduct assessment of existing ESX/ESXi version levels and patch levels, including security patch levels
  • Identify potential opportunities to optimize configuration and improve performance

> Storage

  • Conduct assessment of existing Tier-1 storage environment supporting VMware vSphere ESX/ESXi host servers
  • Conduct assessment of storage environment to determine potential disk IO latency, throughput and/or bandwidth issues
  • Conduct assessment of existing FC and/or iSCSI integration with VMware vSphere ESX/ESXi host servers and primary Tier storage array platform
  • Conduct an assessment of the existing VMFS datastore layout, datastore configuration, and provide best-practices for optimal VMFS datastore growth in conjunction with your existing storage platform
  • Perform survey of virtual disk configuration of Microsoft Windows based virtual machines and provide best-practice configuration for both space utilization and disk IO performance

> Network

  • Conduct assessment of existing physical network topology, VLAN configurations and trunking configurations specific to supporting the VMware vSphere ESX/ESXi and storage environments.
  • Conduct assessment of existing ESX hosts NIC connections to the data and storage networks
  • Conduct assessment of existing ESX/ESXi vSwitch, port group, vmnic, and virtual machine vnic configurations

> Physical Servers

  • Conduct assessment of physical host server configurations supporting both rack and blade server deployments. Includes assessment of blade server chassis inter-connect fabrics supporting both ethernet/data and storage fabrics.
  • Conduct assessment of individual server configuration specific to CPU and Memory resources based on existing virtual machine resource loads

TRAINING WORKSHOP

In addition to assessing your key infrastructure components, we also provide an interactive workshop training session with your administrators & engineers covering a variety of important and valuable topics specific to on-going management and growth of your virtualized infrastructure. Topics include:

  • VMware best practices specific to vSphere and associated components such as HA, DRS, DPM, vCenter, snapshots, templates, virtual machine deployment, and more...
  • Provide best-practices architecture design information on deploying Tier-1 applications on VMware vSphere (e.g. Citrix, Exchange, SQL, etc.)
  • Provide best-practices architecture design information specific to your current storage fabric, storage array, and ESX/ESXi hosts
  • Cover best-practices and design considerations for storage load-balancing and fault-tolerance with vSphere 4 vStorage platform integration
  • Provide best practices architecture design information specific to your current storage array snapshot integration with VMware vSphere as part of a total backup/data protection and/or off-site replication strategy
  • Provide best-practices architecture design information specific to your current server hardware and network/storage connectivity
  • Provide best practice architecture design considerations for proper load-balancing and fault-tolerance of the ESX network uplinks and the current storage fabric utilizing port-channels, load-balancing, nic-teaming, and more...

GUIDANCE YOU CAN TRUST

Our Infrastructure & Storage Assessment service is designed to help provide you the guidance and confidence you need to ensure that your existing infrastructure can provide you the solid reliable results you need to support your business applications, your end-users, and your customers. Contact us today to see how you can leverage our team of experts to help you ensure your infrastructure is ready for today and for tomorrow.