Murphy Exploration and Production Company, Improves Server Manageability and Flexibility

Server Flexibility:

Virtuozzo Solution and Implementation
Once the disaster recovery solution was chosen, Jee was faced with implementing the solution and recreating the server infrastructure for his data center. Despite the daunting task, Virtuozzo was deployed and tested in about a week’s time.

Once the solution was refined, the migration from physical to virtual was fairly straightforward because of server flexibility. In order to start with clean new servers, Jee built the servers and then virtualized servers from the ground up. He loaded clean Windows 2003 instances and created a new virtual environment for each application. Each application was loaded as a clean instance and the data was carefully migrated to completely recreate the environments. He even migrated his Exchange server on a mailbox basis to ensure that the migration was perfect.

Included in the deployment are a Citrix presentation server, Exchange, Microsoft SQL, RSA, file and print and a domain controller. “It’s a huge benefit to be able to update an application and be able to just restart that particular virtual environment without affecting any of the other virtual environments or applications,” said Jee. The Murphy configuration usually includes about 5 virtual environments with applications running on a Dell 6850 with full RAM and quad processors. The robust server configuration was selected not because the virtualization and application required it, on the contrary, this configuration was selected because it is expected to support the growth of the applications for at least five to six years.

One the biggest benefits is the time for recoverability and with the disaster still impacting daily operations, recoverability became a primary factor. “It used to take at least a half day to recover and restore an application. Now with the Virtuozzo backup and recovery toolset I can do it within a half-hour.”