A one-week virtualization upgrade with zero daytime downtime: UEC Electronics
UEC Electronics, a mission-critical product manufacturer, needed to modernize a strained VMware and storage environment without losing a minute of production. Katalyst delivered in a week with no downtime during business hours.
About UEC Electronics
UEC Electronics (UEC) specializes in the development and sale of mission-critical products. The company offers comprehensive solutions in engineering design, product development, rapid prototyping, and lean, innovative manufacturing services, along with its own line of mobile power products.
The Challenge
UEC's biggest challenge was a lack of IT expertise in specific areas of its infrastructure. The company struggled with a mixed VMware 4.1 and 5.1 environment and local storage that was near capacity and was not shared, centrally managed, or expandable. Server maintenance was cumbersome and required downtime and after-hours work. UEC relies on mission-critical applications every day, where downtime during business hours can mean thousands of dollars in lost productivity. Knowing how vulnerable the current infrastructure was, UEC partnered with Katalyst to design and deploy a solution that would add resiliency and make expansion easy as the company grew.
The Solution
The deployment took one week with zero downtime during business hours. It included upgrading VMware hosts from 4.1 and 5.1 to 5.5, deploying VMware vCenter 5.5, deploying a new iSCSI shared storage SAN, adding a new Cisco iSCSI and virtualization switch stack, and expanding vSwitch capacity with additional NICs in each host. All virtual servers were migrated to the new platform.
The Results
The VMware upgrade let UEC take advantage of vMotion and other advanced virtualization features. The new SAN resolved storage constraints, minimized server downtime, and added capacity and scalability for future growth. UEC gained cluster redundancy and a performance increase from the networking and storage reconfiguration. The team can now grow Windows server capacity on the fly and migrate resources seamlessly during scheduled maintenance windows. To close out the project, UEC's staff was trained to maintain and support the SAN and new virtualization architecture through thorough documentation and knowledge transfer.
Key Takeaways
- No daytime downtime. A full virtualization upgrade delivered in a week without interrupting production.
- Storage solved. A shared, scalable SAN replaced near-full local storage.
- Resilient by design. Cluster redundancy and easier maintenance windows.
- Knowledge transferred. Staff trained and documented to support the new environment.
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