VMware Infrastructure Upgrade for Healthcare Data Center Modernization

Modernizing Virtualization, Storage, Backup, and Disaster Recovery for a Maryland Health Department

Replacing End-of-Life Infrastructure to Improve Reliability and Resiliency

This Maryland health department faced a growing challenge with critical data center infrastructure that was approaching the end of its warranty and support lifecycle. Key components of the environment— including VMware vSphere hosts, storage infrastructure, backup systems, disaster recovery resources, and network switching equipment— required replacement to ensure continued availability of essential applications and services.

The health department needed a solution capable of supporting a five-year or longer lifecycle while controlling acquisition and licensing costs. At the same time, the new environment needed to minimize operational complexity, reduce training requirements for IT staff, and preserve service availability throughout the migration process. Because the health department relied on virtualization for critical business systems, any modernization effort would need to support seamless migration of existing workloads while improving backup, replication, and disaster recovery capabilities.

To address these objectives, the health department partnered with Data Networks to execute a comprehensive VMware infrastructure upgrade spanning compute, storage, networking, backup, and disaster recovery systems.

VMware Infrastructure Upgrade Delivers Modern Compute and Storage Platforms

At the core of the project was a complete VMware infrastructure upgrade designed to replace aging virtualization hardware with a modern, high-performance platform optimized for long-term growth and operational efficiency.

Data Networks deployed two new Dell PowerEdge R660 servers at the production data center to serve as the foundation of a new VMware vSphere cluster. To provide shared storage, the team implemented a Dell ME5024 all-flash SAN configured with iSCSI connectivity, delivering improved storage performance and reliability for virtualized workloads.

Supporting the new virtualization environment, Data Networks also deployed two Juniper EX4400 data center switches that served as both top-of-rack access switches and dedicated storage fabric switches for the iSCSI SAN infrastructure. The switches were integrated into the health department’s existing network architecture and configured to support high-performance communication between the VMware hosts and storage platform.

To maximize licensing efficiency and align with the health department’s cost-control objectives, Data Networks implemented VMware vSphere Foundation licensing for 64 cores, helping the health department optimize the value of VMware’s modern per-core licensing model.

Strengthening Backup and Disaster Recovery Capabilities

In addition to modernizing the production environment, Data Networks enhanced the health department’s backup and disaster recovery architecture through the deployment of new infrastructure at both the primary and secondary data center locations.

At the disaster recovery facility, Data Networks installed an additional Dell PowerEdge R660 server configured with VMware vSphere to support backup, replication, and recovery operations. The project also included deployment of a new Dell PowerProtect Data Domain backup appliance at the primary data center, providing a highly efficient backup repository integrated with the health department’s existing Veeam Backup & Replication environment.

Following installation, Data Networks migrated and validated twelve production workloads using VMware migration technologies, including vMotion, to minimize service interruptions during the transition. Existing Veeam backup and replication configurations were updated to support the new infrastructure, and extensive backup, restore, and replication testing was conducted to validate data integrity and recovery capabilities.

The team performed comprehensive testing of all infrastructure components, including compute, storage, networking, high availability, failover functionality, and performance validation. Once testing was completed, Data Networks migrated the remaining production workloads, transitioned services to the new environment, and decommissioned legacy infrastructure components.

The completed VMware infrastructure upgrade delivered a modern data center platform built around two Dell PowerEdge R660 production servers, one Dell PowerEdge R660 disaster recovery server, one Dell ME5024 all-flash SAN, two Juniper data center switches, and one Dell Data Domain backup appliance. The result was a scalable, resilient, and cost-effective infrastructure that improved performance, strengthened disaster recovery readiness, enhanced data protection capabilities, and positioned the health department to support critical services for years to come.

Tags: SLG, local government, healthcare, datacenter