Client
UkrgasbankWeb-site: www.ukrgasbank.com
About Client
JSB Ukrgasbank is a Ukrainian 94.9%-state-owned commercial bank founded in 1993. In terms of assets and shares in the retail market, it is one of the 10 largest Ukrainian banks.
Tasks
Ukrgasbank needed to conduct a periodic extensive IT infrastructure monitoring, notify the responsible personnel about errors, and maintain systems and services in an efficient state. Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2012 was planned to be deployed to accomplish these goals.
Problems
The survey revealed that Ukrgasbank’s existing infrastructure was based on Windows Server 2003—all Active Directory (AD) domain controllers ran on this OS.
Active Directory Domain Services formed the basis for operation of the entire infrastructure, so the legacy OS limited the introduction of new services and products, as well as migration to new OS versions both the server and client side since Windows Server 2003 domains do not support all Windows 7 Group Policies. Therefore, the decision was made to update all directory services to AD 2008. Given the scale of Ukrgasbank’s infrastructure, these activities called for a separate project.
Criteria
On the first stages of the project, SI BIS audited the infrastructure and estimated the project scope and time-frame. A domain controller backup mechanism was also developed to make the procedure more reliable and secure.
Solutions
IT Infrastructure AuditAdvantages
Keeping in mind that Ukrgasbank’s needed its business processes to keep running and no downtimes were allowed, domain controllers were migrated gradually to Windows Server 2008 R2. Windows Server 2003 domain controllers were downgraded to a member server level and were taken out of the domain. After that, the server hardware was replaced where necessary and Windows Server 2008 R2 and domain controller configuration functionality were installed.
The main difficulty was that in addition to the main domain forest, a few additional domains with trust relationships were used. On top of that, there were domains with domain controllers and DNS servers based on Windows 2000 Server in the network.
Results
The project took about two months in total, during which over 50 domain controllers were successfully updated.
While being successive to AD 2003 and maintaining the general ideology of Microsoft directory services, AD 2008 had many improvements and innovations that enabled optimisation of the total cost of infrastructure ownership and contributed to the business process continuity.