Private Cloud

Customer

An IT services company that builds and manages applications/services for their clients needed an affordable solution for hosting. Their customers are from a wide range of industries and run various applications, mostly on Windows. The applications that the company manages include sharepoint servers, POS applications, MS Exchange, MS SQL Server, FTP servers, and others.

Solution

Ripple Web has built a private cloud on hardware dedicated to their use. As their customer base has grown, we’ve added storage and processing power as needed. Today, they are running about 50 virtual machines using more than 15TB or data.

For this setup, we decided on Proxmox for the cloud OS. Proxmox is open source cloud management software build on Debian that we’ve been using for years. It has a great web interface for managing all of the resources in the private cloud and utilizes both kvm and openvz VMs. This setup has evolved over the years and new servers have been added as the customer’s business has grown.

The web nodes are fast servers with plenty of RAM. The differences in the setup is based on when the new hardware has been added. The different servers also allows the customer to move VMs from machine to machine based on needed resources. Plenty of low usage VMs are housed on the Core-Xeon servers and those VMs that have higher performance requirements are run on the faster Gulftown servers.

The storage nodes also have different setups for different needs. Our standard enterprise grade 7K SATA drives are plenty fast enough for most VMs, especially when configure in RAID 10. Some of the VMs need faster disk IO, which is the reason for the storage server setup with the 15K SAS drives. Some of the VMs running off of that storage are running MSSQL. The backup server doesn’t have a need for a lot of horsepower, just lots of storage. The 6TB is plenty for snapshot storage f he VMs as not all VS get backup up and those that do get backed up are compressed.