On-Premise Virtual Private Cloud

The ITS Data Center offers two virtual server services. The benefits include not having to purchase a physical equipment, faster provisioning, using less power, cooling and space.

The ITS team will consult with the customer to ensure their needs are met. ITS takes responsibility for the hardware, virtualization software, and configuration to ensure a stable and secure shared hosting environment. 

Enterprise grade

• Fee-based service
• Servers and storage are highly redundant
• Offered for Windows, Unix or any operating system that can run on VMware ESXi (Intel processor OS).
• Available for IS3 P1-P4 data and higher regulatory requirements (with consultation)
• Easy to backup servers to the ITS backup service

Request a Enterprise Grade virtual server

Academic grade

• FREE to faculty and grad students (with approval from faculty). Subsidized by ITS and academic units.
• Best suited for group or departmental websites, self managed developer sandboxes and non-critical applications.
• Servers and storage are highly redundant (vs Joyant Nebula with limited redundancy)
• Available for IS3 P1-P2 data. Not designed for P3-P4 or other data with high regulatory requirements.
• Service does not include backups but customers can choose to pay for backups via the backup service.

Options

There are two options for On-site virtual private hosting:

Self-managed

You are responsible for ordering and receiving the equipment. The Data Center team will work with you to determine the plan for installation of the equipment. You are responsible for all aspects of administering the server, operating system, and application. Rack space, network ports, and environmental monitoring are provided. Firewall and VPN services are also available upon request.

Managed Services

ITS offers fee based system-administration services for Windows, Linux/Unix and VMware platforms. These services are not required; all server-hosting options are available in both "self service" and "managed service" mode. More information about Managed Services 

Roles and Responsibilities of System Administrators vs Client

Virtual Hosting engineers are generally responsible for the Virtual Infrastructure [VI] that the virtual guests run on -- that is, the physical equipment, the operating systems on that equipment, and the configuration and management of the virtualization software. The customer is responsible for the management of the virtual guests.

Responsibilities of Virtual Hosting engineers:

• Provide engineering assistance to ensure right-size and right-performing virtual guests
• Provide assistance  into the Data Center network topology
• Engineer all layers of the VI technology stack for high availability and compliance with UC, UCSC, and ITS policy
• Apply patches and upgrades as recommended for the virtual infrastructure
• Monitor and tune the physical server and storage environment 
• Manage permissions and security groups within the virtual infrastructure
• Serve as a point of escalation for server administrators managing virtual guests
• Manage virtual-machine backup  software, hardware and backup schedules

Virtual guests may be managed by the customer, or management may be contracted to the Data Center systems teams.

In either case, the responsibilities of the server administrator of a virtual guest are:

• Serve as the primary troubleshooter for issues with a virtual guest system
• For the virtual guest:
  • Review logs, performance metrics, system status, resource usage and events; identify and implement parameter changes to improve the performance and security of the virtual guest
  • Maintain base OS and network security; this includes OS patching and configuration, as well as firewall settings for the virtual guest
  • Perform system tuning for the virtual guest
  • Create new virtual guests, restore from virtual machine backups, and perform ongoing virtual-hardware changes as needed
    • for self-managed systems, the VHE performs these tasks on behalf of the client (creating the VM, coordinate VM restores and any virtual-hardware changes)
    • for systems managed by the Data Center systems teams, the server administrators are trained and generally authorized to perform these tasks on guests they manage
  • Escalate to Virtual Hosting Engineering for additional support, for issues that might be related to physical hardware resources

Other responsibilities and operational assumptions:

• Application and database administrators can have read-only access to hypervisor management for access to performance charts to assist with managing the virtual guest and troubleshooting
• Resource contention may occur due to a server host failure or over-allocation; if this occurs, production systems will have priority in resource allocation over non-production system