A well-known video streaming organisation has been operating on traditional hardware infrastructure and needs to upgrade to a cloud-based solution. We setup an internal lab for them to test out OpenStack and help them to get up and running on faster, up-to-date technology as soon as possible.
The Challenge
Previously, the customer had been running their system (which consisted of both static web hosting and video streaming) on VMware. To begin with, they successfully moved their static web hosting services to AWS, leaving just the video streaming services on the traditional infrastructure.
Unfortunately, due to the large bandwidth costs associated with streaming, it was not feasible for them to move the video services to a public cloud platform like AWS. Also, they already have their own internal infrastructure which is perfectly capable of providing this bandwidth, without the extra costs associated with hosting it externally. They wanted to provision a private Cloud solution utilising this internal infrastructure and complete a VMware to OpenStack migration, but weren’t sure where to begin. So they asked for our advice.
The Aptira Solution
OpenStack is a popular private Cloud solution and its easy to see why. With less resources required to operate the solution, users are provided with greater flexibility and reduced operational costs. Often, the OpenStack migration can be the most daunting part, but luckily there are several tools on the market to help simplify this process.
First of all, we designed and deployed Mirantis OpenStack directly onto their existing hardware in a lab environment using Mirantis Fuel. Fuel makes it easy to deploy and manage a variety of OpenStack distributions, accelerating the time-consuming, complex and error-prone process of deploying and running OpenStack at scale.
We then used GEMINI – our custom-built OpenStack migration engine – to migrate their SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) virtual machines from VMware to OpenStack. GEMINI has been specifically designed to automatically move workloads and VMs between platforms – addressing the various difficulties that both operators and administrators face when migrating existing workloads onto OpenStack. Also, it integrates completely with OpenStack projects, minimising deployment and maintenance efforts.
The Result
The client now has a fully functioning OpenStack lab environment to test their video streaming services. They have successfully evaluated OpenStack and decided that they would like to move their production video streaming services to their new in-house platform.
The video services will no longer be streaming externally – resulting in a significant reduction in operational costs, whilst also allowing them to take advantage of the new flexibility that their in-house private OpenStack cloud solution provides.
