VLSS is a group of Oracle and VMWare experts that focus on helping customers implement and utilize Oracle products.
Since its inception in 2005, the company has been premiere partners with Oracle and recently started the initiative to move off Unix and into Linux.
Under this initiative, VLSS completed the first migration for Nassau Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES). Nassau BOCES provides cost-effective shared services for 56 school districts in Nassau County, Long Island. VLSS was able to help Nassau BOCES to virtualize their PeopleSoft environment.
“We’re one of the first to get a customer to complete a migration off of Unix to VMware Linux and have them publish a success story,” said Dean Bolton, chief architect, co-founder, LicenseFortress, VLSS
Nassau BOCES engaged VLSS to virtualize their PeopleSoft environment, which was running PeopleSoft 9.1 for Finance and Human Resources on physical IBM AIX hardware. The organization also had a test/disaster recovery (DR) environment for PeopleSoft running in a separate data center.
Since the AIX servers running PeopleSoft were old and needed to be upgraded, the timing was right to move to VMware.
“Now they can retire that old hardware,” Bolton said.
Moving to VMWare Linux allowed the company move away from very expensive hardware, according to Bolton. Because VMWare is readily available and on a variety of platforms, it has a much bigger footprint and knowledge base which helps acclimate the company easier.
Now the company has the flexibility to use multiple testing environments that can be upgraded in parallel, Bolton said, and has better metrics and validation processes for the new network environment.
“They are happier because they can do these projects and upgrades faster with less headaches,” Bolton said.
There is a savings that comes from migrating to Linux, Bolton explained, it is a better business proposition to virtualize.
The only drawback to the process was a learning curve, Bolton said. VLSS helped workers understand the system and employees attended training classes on how to do Linux operations.
“More and more customers can take part of service, provided by us and VMware internally,” said Bolton. “I think it’s a win for everyone.”