The Centre Hospitalier de Carentoir called on téïcée to switch from a proprietary virtualisation solution to the open-source Proxmox VE solution, and to implement high availability and data replication.
Virtualisation, high availability and replication: what's involved?
Virtualisation involves creating a virtual representation of a resource that is identical to its physical version. This could be an operating system, a server or a network. This optimised, cost-effective approach allows you to make the most of a resource's capacity by running several operating systems simultaneously, for example.
With a proprietary virtualisation solution in place, Carentoir Hospital wanted to migrate to a new open-source solution. The hospital wanted to move away from a proprietary solution and towards an open, unbundled solution where all functions are accessible without a licence.
As well as enabling synchronous replication, the principle of which is based on the simultaneous recording of data on each machine in the cluster, this migration was also an opportunity to introduce high availability (HA), which makes the system tolerant to service interruptions and prevents any loss of data. This approach, which marks a shift from a corrective strategy to a preventive one, leads to greater robustness and reliability. For a hospital like Carentoir, which processes and manages highly sensitive data, this is all the more crucial.
How did the mission go?
Migrating from the proprietary solution to Proxmox VE is a tricky operation, given the need to avoid service interruptions. To achieve this, the téïcée temporarily set up a transition server. Intended as an online relay, it temporarily hosted the virtual machines to be transferred and carried out the necessary tests, while guaranteeing the installation of the Proxmox VE solution. This was done in parallel on the hospital's two servers before the final migration of the virtual machines (VMs) to these servers.
This procedure was also an opportunity to reinforce high availability by replicating the data required when migrating a virtual machine from one node to another in the cluster. In this type of architecture, téïcée uses Ceph, a widely-used open-source storage solution. One of the features of Ceph is that it introduces the notion of a “quorum”, in addition to the (in this case two) nodes in the cluster. This third-party element, in communication with each of the nodes, is needed to determine whether a server is out of service.
Today ?
The Hospital center of Carentoir is now equipped with a modern, efficient and more robust infrastructure than the previous one, which guarantees continuity of service. Completely free, Proxmox VE also has the advantage of being a smooth and lightweight virtualization solution since this Open Source solution does not add encryption, background tasks or anti-cracking system, tools that are necessary in the case of a proprietary solution. It is a secure solution, provided by a European company, supported by a large and active community that constantly monitors and used by a very wide variety of public and private actors.