Red Hat Keeps the Lights on with Red Hat Virtualization

Red Hat has been a technology industry leader for many years. We are not just creators of innovative open source technologies, but we are also consumers of our own technologies. At Red Hat, nearly all of our core IT infrastructure runs on Red Hat Virtualization. From our development environment all the way to production. Several of our mission critical applications are powered by Red Hat Virtualization including our email systems, identity management, subscription manager, customer service portal, and many more applications. Since we are a global company, we have deployed thousands of VMs that need to be up and running 24/7, and we chose Red Hat Virtualization to get the job done.

Red Hat IT maintains thousands of VMs that run Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Our Red Hat Virtualization hypervisors and management nodes run on various hardware such as Cisco UCS blades. It is also worth noting that our Red Hat Virtualization production environment is highly available, we have an “A” side and a “B” side Red Hat Virtualization cluster and the VMs are distributed across them in a way that if one side goes down our services are not impacted.

In today’s post, I am going to highlight three different applications used in production at Red Hat IT and how Red Hat Virtualization helps us to keep the lights on.

1. MariaDB - One of the most popular open source relational databases in the industry, and many of our IT maintained applications use MariaDB. Across our environments, we have over 100 MariaDB VMs which are used to support a vast number of internal and external applications at Red Hat. The databases are usually set up in pairs with Replication configured, and have 8 - 16 Gb of RAM, 4 - 8 CPUs, and are attached to some form of storage device.
2. Zimbra/Email - Red Hat associates have an option to use Gmail (Google for Work) or Zimbra for their email. The MX infrastructure used by both services and the Zimbra nodes are all running as VMs on our Red Hat Virtualization infrastructure. We have more than 30 VMs supporting our email system, with specs that vary from 2 - 32 Gb of RAM, going all the way up to 16 CPUs. This service is provided to more than 8000 users with around 3 million emails per day being processed (either delivered or disregarded [if spam]).
3. 389 Directory Server/LDAP - Our LDAP infrastructure is also built on Red Hat Virtualization with more than 90 VMs throughout our environments built to support the different functions and services that IT has to offer. Most of the VMs are configured up to 4 CPUs and up to 8 GB of RAM.

These three applications are just a small sample of the type of services and technologies Red Hat IT entrusts Red Hat Virtualization with. Additional applications include Apache, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) 6, Tomcat, MongoDB, and many others.

If you would like to power your organization with Red Hat Virtualization, please download our fully supported 60-day trial today.