“That just happened!”  ~Ricky Bobby As I was leaving Wausau Thursday night, I reminisced on the events that had transpired over the four-day period and a feeling of calm awe washed over me. In my head, I had one of those moments where I was truly shocked at how incredible things turned out. In spite of all the glitches and people that thought it could not be done, we had utilized next generation datacenter architectural principals and equipment and absolutely crushed what we thought was possible from a perspective of virtualizing Tier-1 mission-critical application workloads. All of the times I have stood in front of audiences and talked about how incredible VMware vSphere is and all the times I have pontificated about the advantages of the ...

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“The best laid schemes of mice and men / Go often askew” ~Robert Burns As with every great journey, there are bumps in the road. Our execution of our test plans was no different in that regard. However, with an incredible team of guys from Aspirus and Ahead and with the backing of some amazing vendor partners, we persevered and gathered some truly extraordinary data and results. Since we laid-out the test plan in Part 3 of this blog series, I figured I would keep to that layout and give the results of the execution of each phase in the same format. Test #1: “Bare Metal” The execution of Test 1 did not end up taking place as we intended. An issue with 64-bit print drivers in EPIC ...

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Once we understood the application architecture and the challenges we were up against, we needed to develop a test plan in order to validate the VMware/UCS architecture. Once again, we enlisted the help of the Aspirus team and sat down together to figure out how to approach the deployment. The first interesting challenge of the test plan was that there is no such thing as a Hyperspace load simulator. This meant that in order to truly test the capabilities of the next-gen infrastructure, we had to test with real users, in production. Typically, I would be the first person to say: “No way should we test in Production…” but there truly was no other way we could have been able to put a load on the ...

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As we set out to tackle the challenge ahead of us, we put together an all-star team of architects and specialists to analyze what it would take to successfully virtualize this environment. From the Aspirus team, we enlisted help from their lead architect and team lead, Tom Whalen and from Phil Hammen and Jesse Kozikowski to help us fully understand the architecture of the application and existing infrastructure components and develop a test plan that would allow us to isolate specific variables and test for success. Application Architecture Up to this point, we have been talking about “Virtualizing EPIC.” Many folks have been asking me, exactly what did you virtualize? What we virtualized was the Hyperspace layer of the EPIC application stack. This is a client-server application ...

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A few months back I had a meeting with Glynn Hollis at Aspirus and he told me his biggest pain this year was in his EPIC environment and he would love if Ahead could help them overcome their challenges. They currently support 2500+ users in their healthcare system but that is just the beginning of what they will grow to in the next couple years. The biggest issue they have is that the environment has grown to 20 servers just to host the Hyperspace application for their environment and if they grow as they estimate they will it would grow to a ridiculous number of physical servers. Of course, the first question we asked (not yet knowing the depth of talent Aspirus has on their team) ...

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