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Customer Case Studies: Advanced Server Management

Hugo Parra PLM, Symantec

UP B05: Customer Case Studies: Advanced Server Management

Sandi K Garcia Wyndham Worldwide

Don Platt Gentiva

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Wyndham Server Management Roadmap

Sandi K Garcia Director, Infrastructure Platform Services


SYMANTEC VISION 2013 3

Agenda

• Introduction

• Challenges

• Solution

• Success Criteria

• Implementation

• Results

• Recommendations

• Q & A (towards end of session)



One of the world’s largest hospitality companies, Wyndham Worldwide provides a broad range of accommodations, products, and services for both consumer travelers and B2B customers across the globe through its three business units:

– Wyndham Hotel Group, the world’s largest hotel company based on the number of properties, is now home to over 7,340 franchised hotels and 627,400 hotel rooms worldwide;

– Wyndham Exchange & Rentals is the worldwide leader in vacation exchange and the world’s largest professionally managed vacation rentals business, providing more than 5 million leisure-bound families annually with access to over 103,000 vacation properties in 100 countries through its prominent exchange and vacation rental brands;

– Wyndham Vacation Ownership, the industry and timeshare ownership market leader, develops, markets, and sells vacation ownership interests and provides consumer financing to owners through its network of 190 vacation ownership resorts serving more than 920,000 owners throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, and the South Pacific.


Wyndham-at-a-Glance

SYMANTEC VISION 2013 5 UP B05: Customer Case Studies: Advanced Server Management


Introduction

• Background

– Infrastructure platform services, approximately 1000 Wyndham Worldwide endpoints across all OS types on Cisco and EMC hardware in 4 datacenters and 15 remote locations.

– For Infrastructure Server Management

• Altiris Server Management Suite

• Control Compliance Suite

• Netbackup



Challenges and Goals

• PCI compliance risks, manual deployment efforts, lack of standards, and reactive break/fix.

• Pay per incident support, mean time to resolve, impact relationships, and time to deliver services.

• Lack of centrally managed products and processes. Manual server builds, no impact relationships defined, no asset management for servers.

• Maturity level of the IT organization.

• Standardize, Stabilize and Simplify.



Options and Solution

• Vendors considered and measured included BMC, HP and Symantec.

• BMC and HP have enterprise class and robust offerings, however Symantec was put to the test.

– Conducted a 60 day POC

– Built a single application and database server

– Deployed approximately 80 agents to test all flavors of OS types across locations

• Symantec successfully met success criteria and goals for server management.



Success Criteria


Success Criteria Full Limited Not Comments

Inventory and Discovery Detect new servers

t Enabled IP range scan and discussed other detection methods, such as import from 3rd party (Solarwinds) or AD

Collect HW Inventory

t

Agent installed on several Windows Servers and one Unix (Solaris 10) Server. Also retrieved agentless inventory for several servers via SNMP

Collect SW Inventory t

See HW Inventory.

Asset Management and CMDB Manage asset relationships

t Demonstrated how to build asset/CI relationships

Ability to show dependency diagram

t

Demonstrated grid as diagram view was not displaying correctly due to issues with Adobe Flash in Wyndham environment. Demonstrated RAD functionality on Symantec demo environment

Ability to add non-discoverable data t

Added information such as Owner and Location.

Ability to manage 'reports-to' for user (asset owners) t

Added user information, including 'direct reports' and 'reports to'.

Ability to add new resource types t

Demonstrated how to add new resource/asset types

Ability to add new data classes and asset associations t

Demonstrated how to add new data classes and association types (1:1, 1:many)

Archer Support t

Limited demonstration. Design concept approved by Symantec and Info Security


Success Criteria (cont.)


Success Criteria Full Limited Not Comments

Change Management Detect configuration changes

t

Enabled history for selected data classes. For more advanced detection of configuration changes, Symantec recommends to use of Control Compliance Suite, currently tested by Wyndham in another POC.

Virtual Machine Management Retrieve inventory for ESX host and guest machines t

Reviewed information gathered via agentless inventory of vSphere and ESX Hosts

Ability to show host to guest relationship t

Demonstrated virtual machine management views

Reporting Solution provides out-of-the box dashboards

t Demonstrated out-of-the box dashboards

Solution provides out-of-the-box reports t Demonstrated out-of-the box reports

Solution provides ability to create custom reports t

Demonstrated out-of-the box report builder

Solution provides analytical cube reporting

t Plug-in for pivot tables was not displaying due to IE security settings. Functionality was shown in Symantec demo environment.

General Management Console is easy to use

Garry (Wyndham) team will need to spend more time with console before making this decision.

Ease of install t Install Wizard

Ability to connect to 3rd party data source (i.e. Axios Assyst) t

Demonstrated import/export capabilities and discussed options with Assyst team


Implementation

• We are working through a few challenges with the backend, mostly related to our internal environmental configurations.

– PCI Compliance Server Hardening

– Firewall and network segmentation and rules

• Server Management Suite will be the collection point, the database, that will feed our ITSM solution, and report from our BI Analytics tool.


SYMANTEC VISION 2013 12 UP B05: Customer Case Studies: Advanced Server Management


Results

• Given that we are still in the midst of implementation, we still have some items that are being worked through, but mostly related to our internal infrastructure environment, security and network segmentation and server hardening.

• All agents have been pushed to our server environment. We are working through auto-Discovery design and implementation. Application Mapping is in planning stages.

• Long term goal is a fully functional CMDB tied to Incident and Change Management for impact relationships and tracking.

• Roadmap items are Server Automation and Software Distribution for further streamlining and standardization.



Recommendations

• Identify pain points and gaps.

• Define operational strategy and success criteria.

• Know your environment specific variables.

• Make sure the vendor or partner performing the implementation are knowledgeable of the product. No assembly line push.

• Develop an operational support model with defined roles and responsibilities, especially if shared across teams.


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Server Management Suite: Monitor Solution

Don Platt Manager, Technical Services - Infrastructure Architect



Agenda

• Introduction

• Challenges

• Solution

• Specific use cases and interesting things to note

• Future monitoring initiatives

• Q & A



Introduction

• Gentiva

– Home Health and Hospice

– 25,000+ Employees

– About 2,000 network devices, spread across roughly 450 locations

– About 900 servers across 2 locations – 96% Virtualized

• Who am I?

– Been working with Altiris since Lab Expert (about 1999)

– Direct the activities of our Midrange Systems team



Challenges

• Main goal:

– Monitoring solution to monitor switches, routers, servers (both Linux and Windows), and AS/400.

– Application level monitoring

– Integrate with our ticketing system

• Holistic approach:

– Complete server management suite that included monitoring

– Easy to deploy and maintain

– Offered unique and valuable integration points and auto remediation



Solution

• Altiris Server Management Suite

– What sets this solution apart from the rest? Specifically Monitor Solution

• Ease of deployment

• Concept of Monitoring Policies vs. “How exactly am I going to monitor this new server?”

• Detection Policies

• Asset Management integration

• Workflow integration


SYMANTEC VISION 2013 Presentation Identifier Goes Here 20

SYMANTEC VISION 2013 UP B05: Customer Case Studies: Advanced Server Management 21

SYMANTEC VISION 2013 Presentation Identifier Goes Here 23

SYMANTEC VISION 2013

Management of Alerts using the Event Console

UP B05: Customer Case Studies: Advanced Server Management 25


Construction of a Policy

Apply to hosts

Policy

Rule – i.e. CPU > 95% over the past 30 minutes

Metric – i.e. Processor - % Processor Time (_Total)


Notable Items

• Network Device Policy – Asset Management

– Event Correlation

• VMware – Datastores – Percent provisioned, actual provisioned, orphaned snapshots

– Cluster metrics for N+1 status

– Host connection status

• DFS Backlogs

• Journal Mailbox

• Ticket generation

• RightFax Queues (Board Servers and Fax-Email Queue)

• Agentless verification

• Disk info in tickets

• IOPs



Future Monitoring Initiatives

• Hardware Monitoring via DRAC and RSA

• Full integration into ticketing system

• Identify beneficial Workflows and leverage them for automation

– I.e. Automatically opening a ticket with AT&T when a circuit is down

• CRC error rates on SIP interfaces

• User experience monitoring – i.e. page loads, etc…



Q&A


Thank you!

Copyright © 2012 Symantec Corporation. All rights reserved. Symantec and the Symantec Logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Symantec Corporation or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. This document is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended as advertising. All warranties relating to the information in this document, either express or implied, are disclaimed to the maximum extent allowed by law. The information in this document is subject to change without notice.


Sandi K Garcia

[email protected]

Don Platt

[email protected]

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