MAJOR PHARMACY CHAIN
Discover how our products have helped those in the healthcare sector
CHALLENGES
SOLUTION
RESULTS
• No vMotion upgrades possible from vCenter v5.0/5.1 to newer versions
• Limited on-site staff available for migrations and cutovers
• Migrations required minimum impact on production performance
• Migration team required SME support with Cirrus migration solution
• Cirrus Migrate On-Premises allowed upgrades to vCenter and VMware datastores to be accomplished when native VMware products did not allow it
• All vCenter and VMware migrations could be performed fully remote
• Migration performance and its impact to production could be monitored and tweaked remotely
• Cirrus Migrate On-Premises successfully allowed upgrades to vCenter and VMware versions during the migration process
• Cirrus Data’s support on the migration engagement was deemed to be excellent by the customer across the entire migration project
• No onsite support staff was needed during installation, migration, and cutover
• Migration project completed on-time and on-budget
THE STORY
Corporations looking to upgrade storage on older VMware environments often run into a particular challenge when trying to use vMotion for the upgrade – vMotion doesn’t allow any-to-any migrations from older vCenter Server instances to newer vCenter versions, and has only recently offered version 6.0+ upgrade functionality while migrating.
When looking for a solution to these restrictions when it was undergoing a storage upgrade, one of the largest pharmacy store chains in America – specializing in prescriptions, health and wellness products, health information, and photo services – was referred to Cirrus Data. The pharmacy chain needed to migrate out of its VMware 5.0/5.1 environment directly to VMware 6.7 easily and quickly with minimal downtime and impact to its business.
Cirrus Data’s Cirrus Migrate On-Premises solution (formerly DMS) facilitates migration from any vCenter to any other vCenter, regardless of version number. It also updates the VM hardware profile and can even update VMware Tools and the datastore on which the VM resides to the latest level upon cutover.
The DMS Intelligent QoS feature (iQoS) allows the maximum use of all available bandwidth for copying data without impacting production I/O quality, automatically throttling migration when the LUN is too busy.
These advanced features of Cirrus Migrate were the convincing factors that led the chain’s migration technicians to use Cirrus. When moving from EMC source storage to HPE target storage, the company also upgraded its VMware environment to VMware 6.7 easily and quickly with minimal downtime and impact to production. In the end, 150TB assigned to 300 VMs was migrated to the new HPE storage – on-time and on-budget.
Cirrus Migrate On-Premises is the only solution that provides an easy solution for any-to-any vCenter/VMware version migration where the hardware profile of the VM and its related datastore are upgraded during the cutover process, helping VMware and vCenter projects to be completed on-time and on-budget.
Cirrus Migrate On-Premises allows for much greater features and capabilities than the native VMware migration solution and is an easy and excellent product to perform VMware migrations.
