Background
South Devon Health Informatics Service (SDHIS) is a shared service provider delivering an IT Service to the South Devon health community, including South Devon Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, Torbay and Southern Devon Health and Care Trust and South Devon and Torbay CCG. The health community delivers vital services to hundreds of thousands of patients.
The requirement
SDHIS supports around 5,000 PCs and 8,000 user accounts for the health community, relying on its virtual environment for agile and efficient operations. SDHIS was looking for a complete virtual environment update since the support on its existing software and hardware was coming to an end.
The virtual environment had been running on VMware ESXi 6.0, using very few of the enterprise level virtualisation features available. SDHIS required a refresh on all the virtual machine hosts, upgrading them to the latest Dell PowerEdge R640 rack mount servers as well as deploying the latest VMware ESXi 6.7 U1 hypervisor. SDHIS did not have the sufficient resources in its local Server team to implement the new VMware environment on its own. Knowing that Nexus Open Systems specialise in virtualisation and virtual server hosting, SDHIS sought the team’s expert support for this project.
The solution
The Exeter based Nexus technicians and SDHIS team began by running an audit of the existing environment, extracting a comprehensive report of misconfiguration or configuration inconsistencies to identify the necessary improvements. Nexus Technical Consultant, Tom Lord, then worked closely with SDHIS to create a detailed plan for the new vCenter deployment. Nexus implemented the new VMware environment, taking full advantage of the Enterprise Plus licensing utilising ProActive HA, Fault Tolerant Virtual Machines as well as use of Resource Pools and Affinity Rules, to ensure optimum flexibility and efficiency.
The benefits
Nexus successfully upgraded SDHIS VMware environment to the latest agile virtual machines and servers which meet its business needs. Following implementation, SDHIS is now able to offer a greater degree of control around its virtual infrastructure as well as make much better use of the compute resources at its disposal. The comprehensive audit meant the Nexus team could suggest better configuration which enabled SDHIS to maximise its limited resources, including confining its Testing, UAT and Development servers to a lower share of CPU resources. This ensures that critical hospital systems are running at 100% efficiency, helping healthcare staff to work more productively.
Joshua Langdon, Server Infrastructure Specialist at South Devon Health Informatics Service, said:
I would personally definitely recommend Nexus for any virtual environment redesigns in the future. Having both Tom and Neale (Professional Services Delivery Manager) available to assist in the design and implementation of this environment was hugely beneficial to the team. This was the first large project that I had personally managed, and the ability to have a Senior VMware specialist from Nexus on hand was invaluable to ensuring the project was a success. Importantly, the new advanced VMware environment is faster, more responsive and scalable which is essential for managing the health community’s extensive IT networks.
