However, the drawback of using such a service; if the Terminal services fails, then users are unable to access the Virtual Desktop.
This was the case with a middle-level and high-end level recruitment agency (the customer). Previous, they had faced downtime of their virtual desktop due to either hardware or software issues which led to productivity loss and the inability to service their clients.
The customer approached Cloudspace to explore whether Cloudspace can assist them by providing them with more robust terminal services to handle service outages.
Upon customer approval of the recommendations Cloudspace completed the entire exercise over two weekends. The activity was conducted over the weekends to prevent any disruptions to the customer operations during working hours.
The customer performed extensive testing, upon project completion and was very satisfied with the results especially of the failover for their terminal services.
This solution has been in operation for the last 3 years and the customers perform regular failover testing every quarter to ensure that they always have a working disaster recovery solution.
Cloudspace performed a study and extensive discussions with the customer, and the following details were recommended:
- The customer had 4 physical servers and it was proposed that 4 dedicated cloud servers be commissioned to mirror the existing servers.
- To ensure high availability, the existing 4 servers would also be virtualized using Microsoft virtualization technology.
- With the virtualization, almost near-real time replication could be implemented to the customer servers and the Cloudspace virtual servers. This will allow the seamless failover to the Cloudspace Cloud servers for Virtual Desktop services and their applications, in the case of any service failure on their servers.
- The replication services between sites are on-demand basis, when the server detects any changes with a forced replication occurring late at night. The on-demand replication also reduces the bandwidth consumption on the customer’s limited bandwidth.
- To ensure backup, we also proposed that daily snapshots be done on the Cloud Servers.
- The customer was also running a very old Microsoft Active Directory service which required migration to a server Microsoft Active Directory.