Design, Implementation and Maintenance of a Private Cloud Environment servicing own company requirements and requirements of selected customers.

In 2009 the technology to define Data Centers via software was still evolving. The requirement was to host co-located server infrastructure in the data center which hosted a production environment hosting Active Directory, DHCP, DNS, Firewalls, Spam filters, Mail servers and Web servers. The threat management, web and mail services had to service a select group of customers in a redundant data center setup. An additional requirement was to create an environment that could be used for Proof-of-Concept and demonstration of a live working environment during training courses.

The programme spanned a number of years. Through its evolution, several hardware upgrades were carried out to ensure scalability and to support the use of the whole VMware stack. This included products like vSphere, Horizon View, vRealise Suite and vCloud Suite.  A Proof-of-Concept was created to demonstrate practical scenarios using vCenter Orchestrator which doubles up as a Staging environment for customer projects.

Milic-it.ch domain is fully hosted in this environment including Active Directory domain, Virtual Desktops, Mail Server, Web Server and Threat Management Software.

Acronis and Veeam are the backup products used while for replication vSphere complement the Disaster Recovery solution.

The environment has been optimized and is a compelling platform that is used to demonstrate a fully working solution using the whole VMware stack of products. Sascha can access the private cloud infrastructure from any remote location to demonstrate concepts while delivering technical training. A select group of satisfied customers have been using the mail and web servers for a number of years. In addition to the benefits of using a private cloud, customers can also avail themselves to technical expertise. This adds value to the hosting service rendered on top of the comparable offerings from public cloud providers.