how we built a hybrid for 144 virtual machines and 104 TB of data
Our first hero is Vyacheslav Zakariev, DevOps from Henderson, Russian manufacturer and seller of men's clothing. Henderson stores are visited by 11 million people a year, and the website has 7 million users. 1,600 employees support the operation of a network of 160 offline clothing stores in 60 cities in Russia and abroad.
Vyacheslav has been working at the company for more than 15 years, he started as a technical support specialist and saw the times when servers stood in an office closet, connected by copper cables. Zakariev went through the entire migration path with us, so he felt all the pitfalls and was immersed in the technical nuances of migration. Vyacheslav told us about all this in an interview. Inside: moving from Hyper V to VMware, organizing your own data center in the office, integrating it into the cloud, 140+ virtual machines from 250 GB to 4 TB each and a lot of interesting things.
OXYGEN (O): Hello! Tell us how it all started for you and why you decided that it was time for Henderson to take to the clouds? What problems needed to be solved?
Vyacheslav (V): Hello! We had a request to increase the SLA level so that all services would work 24/7/365. Henderson stores are in different time zones, from Krasnodar to Vladivostok, and the office is located in Moscow. The IT department does not work around the clock. Therefore, to complete the task, it was necessary to either increase the staff by 50 percent (we are talking about the system group and technical support), or go to the clouds. We analyzed everything, calculated the costs, and preferred the second.
O: Why did you choose OXYGEN?
Q: We conducted a study, looking primarily at the services offered by cloud operators and at prices. We liked that you can create a flexible hybrid; not every provider will bother with this. This is especially true for huge companies that have an integral monolith and mirror their data centers. Yes, such solutions also have their advantages, but we needed a flexible partner, ready to negotiate, able to take into account the client’s non-standard “wants”.
In addition, OXYGEN is very flexible in terms of pricing for new partners, and prices can be fixed for a certain period, without changing tariffs to take into account inflation, whenever the provider wants it. For example, since our connection in 2022, we have been on the same tariff.
O: Tell us about the migration process itself. How did it start and with what introductions?
Q: We migrated to the cloud in the summer of 2022 and we had a problem – different hypervisor platforms. Henderson used Hyper V, and OXYGEN used VMware, which is right, it's kind of the cloud gold standard. Therefore, we had to establish a procedure for converting virtual machines from one platform to another.
The transition and debugging took about a month. We carried out the conversion procedure together with OXYGEN specialists, who helped us a lot in this matter. The case is complex, especially considering the volume of virtual machines – from 250 GB to 4 TB each.
A: Apart from different hypervisors, were there other difficulties?
Q: Yes, another challenge for us is migrating database servers. Conversion in this case means changing the file system of virtual disks. And databases are very sensitive, so this is a doubly disadvantageous operation. If the outcome is bad, there may be consequences in the form of incorrect data reading and even a “blue screen of death” as a result. Therefore, we carried out the migration with a complete installation of a new machine and transfer of databases by direct copying to a new server in the cloud.
O: And what happened in the end? Are you satisfied with the process and the result?
B: Yes, absolutely! Both we and your guys did a great job with the move. As a result, we transferred 90% of the database servers to OXYGEN, leaving us with only one server running 1C.
We accomplished the task we set—to ensure availability 24/7/365. This is very important, we have online services that should always be available. And all because we love our clients and want to give them the best service.
A: What is the final result regarding the technical characteristics of the cloud?
Q: Henderson has now two types of clouds with these configurations:
2.2 GHz segment:
3.0 GHz segment:
A: But you end up with a hybrid cloud, right?
Q: That's right, we take several IaaS services from you. After the migration, we decided to upgrade our small office data center and turn it into a failover cluster. This, by the way, was our second initial request. Therefore, we purchased equipment and contacted OXYGEN so that your specialists could assemble a small but very stable data center from this equipment in Henderson.
O: And what happened?
Q: This is what we collected in the rack:
6 servers
2 Fiber Channel switches clustered for a stable network;
2 high-performance NVME SSD shelves with Fiber Channel ports.
All this is connected to two uninterruptible power supplies, equipped with the necessary cooling and connected to the flagship OXYGEN data center via gray fiber. The result is a fault-tolerant cluster infrastructure, working in conjunction with the cloud. Our infrastructure split is 70% to 30% in favor of OXYGEN.
By the way, we didn’t have hypervisor clustering before OXYGEN. There was classic virtualization on not very new servers. In general, when I joined the company, the network was on copper and we had to convert everything to optics.
From the author: Vyacheslav spoke about Henderson’s migration to a hybrid cloud at the OXYGEN meetup in the spring of 2024. Find out more about the meetup you can follow this linkand you will find a recording of the report itself below.
A: There is a backup, right?
Q: That's right, this is also on the OXYGEN side. Before the move, we used DPM from Microsoft on our infrastructure, and our file server was about 60 TB. Backing it up via DPM is a perversion. Therefore, cloud backup from OXYGEN helped us a lot here.
Now we use Veeam to backup servers, but already from OXYGEN as a ready-made service, isolated from the main cloud infrastructure. We did stress tests and restorations, we are happy with the results. And in terms of speed, everything is excellent. It’s also important that the service is simple, there are no 3,000 incomprehensible settings. You create rules, enter the number of virtual machines you need, and the data goes into storage, the volume of which is easy to monitor. I really appreciate software like this, so that even a non-IT specialist can understand everything.
O: And what are your overall impressions?
Q: Overall – excellent. There are no complaints about the technical implementation. What is especially important is the attitude towards clients; OXYGEN is always ready to meet each other, with its own approach to each. In this, the philosophy of our companies is similar.
An excellent example is the work of OXYGEN technical support. Feedback on requests – same day without any additional services. If the task is non-standard, you fill out a request, submit a ticket and they answer you very quickly, specialists are always in touch. They also always promptly notify about routine work on the infrastructure.
It is also very important that OXYGEN data centers are located in Russia. As the events of recent years have shown, this is a prerequisite if you want to be sure of the safety of your data.
A: Thank you very much for such a detailed story! I am glad that you are completely satisfied with our services)
Q: Thank you! We have never regretted choosing OXYGEN.
And from the author: thank you for taking the time to write this article! If you have any questions – ask them in the commentsVyacheslav or OXYGEN engineers will be happy to answer them.
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