An international manufacturing company faced the challenge of managing a complex infrastructure spanning 78 global locations, organised in silos. This infrastructure, tailored to meet specific requirements at various sites, had become overly intricate for effective global management. Collaborating with comdivision, the company established an IT environment that is future-proof, secure, and more manageable.
During the evaluation of the existing facilities, data centres, and services, comdivision's architects identified numerous obstacles. Their primary objective was to integrate the data centres into a balanced mix of on-premises and cloud infrastructures spanning the Americas, EMEA, and APAC.
The IT department grappled with the monumental task of overseeing a plethora of globally distributed data centres. These were characterised by a high diversity of servers, hypervisors, applications, and various administrative teams. Each team pursued its own solutions with different providers, intensifying the workload and often leaving scant time for essential infrastructure updates. Moreover, a significant portion of the hardware was outdated.Redefining the data centres and the strategy for localities presented further challenges. Services, such as Exchange, were to be migrated to the cloud, while others consolidated within the corporation. A flexible, scalable cloud solution was needed, capable of downscaling when necessary. The emphasis was on becoming hardware-independent and minimising hardware investments by centralising workloads, even at smaller sites. This new approach also aimed to cater to globally required services.
The goal was to deploy a cloud solution maintained by the service provider for updates and upgrades. This solution would also handle monitoring and assume responsibility for potential hardware issues. The current VMware administrators were to manage the VMs and networks in this setting, with the ability to configure network security and shift VMs between on-premises and the cloud.
A pivotal aspect was leveraging VDIs for various departments within Horizon on Azure, necessitating the use of the same Azure region. Based on this decision, comdivision's lead architects, Jens Hennig and Sascha Schwunk, recommended the Azure VMware Solution (AVS).
The AVS provides a comprehensive VMware stack on client-specific hardware within an Azure data centre. This allows the VMware team to access their familiar vCenter as if they were operating in a local vSphere environment. Additionally, AVS operates with the NSX network solution, offering advanced security features and options, such as full micro-segmentation.
Starting with a few domain controllers and additional servers, the IT landscape began to evolve, introducing combined services on AKS and VMs on AVS. The client is now transitioning to the new data centre and locality concept. Thanks to the VMware Velo Cloud solution managed by comdivision, IT administrators feel as though they are directly working on their local vCenter. With the ability to scale ESXi hosts, the client realises significant cost savings, as investments in new hardware are only needed when future hardware requirements are distinctly defined.
