Upgrade of the Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

The Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) platform first appeared in the University virtualization infrastructure in 2017. More and more virtual machines (VM) had been created and running on this platform since then. In order to accommodate the increasing needs of VMs, the HCI platform had been upgraded and expanded from time to time.

In summer 2023, the second major upgrade of the HCI platform since its launch in 2017 was completed. New computer nodes were deployed in a new clusters. Benefited from the design of the HCI, the VMs hosting operating systems (OS) and application systems (APP) can be migrated from the original clusters to the new clusters, or vice versa, seamlessly. As a result, users of the University did not experience server downtime or service outage during the migration period. Upon the completion of setting up of the HCI platform, the VM migration exercise had been taken place progressively and would be completed in September 2023 tentatively.

Figure 1    Seamless migration of VMs from the original cluster to the new one

After the upgrade, computing processing power, memory and storage has been increased substantially, which means that increasing number of virtual machines can be hosted to facilitate the accommodation of more applications and expansion of the scope of user services. The information security standard of the upgraded HCI platform has also be improved for data encryption in transit.