Charles Rayer, IT manager for London Clubs International, was responsible for managing the roll-out of the IT systems that would support the new electronic gaming systems. Working with Foundation IT, a VMware Enterprise Partner, he evaluated the IT infrastructure that LCI would put in place at both local and head office locations.
“As we were essentially starting our electronic gaming system from scratch, we had to look at the best ways that IT could support the business,” said Charles. “The biggest decision that we had to make was how to ensure that the data generated was always protected.”
To meet the casino’s high availability and management needs, Charles and his team selected VMware® Infrastructure 3 to run the organisation’s central database platforms, as well as host a number of other applications.
Why VMware
Critical to the success of this roll-out was the level of availability the system could deliver. “In the casino industry, any incident would have a severe effect on how customers perceive us, and potentially lead to them going elsewhere,” said Charles. “The loss of any application data can have an impact on the decision making ability of the company as well. The solution that we put together with Foundation IT meant we were covered against any IT issue affecting customers, and that there were no single points of failure within the system.” Moving to a virtualized environment has delivered the following benefits:
- Avoidance of downtime. The portability of virtual machines means that there is no downtime incurred whenever physical server maintenance has to be carried out. Any virtual machine on the affected physical host can be moved to another system using VMware® VMotion™, without any impact on end users accessing the application.
- High availability. VMware® High Availability (VMware HA) is one of the key components of VMware Infrastructure. If the host server underneath a virtual machine is affected by any issue, VMware HA automatically restarts that instance on another physical platform.
- Application delivery. Putting new applications onto a physical server had been a time-consuming process. The testing and re building of each application across the various product versions would take a full day to complete. Using VMware Infrastructure, Charles and his team can now accomplish the same task in less than an hour, as the various machines are stored as templates and deployed when necessary.
- Cost avoidance. By using VMware Infrastructure with HP blades, LCI was able to buy far fewer physical server platforms to run its electronic gaming systems. This led to cost savings in terms of power and space, and also meant that the company avoided having to buy additional physical server hardware.
“We rely on our loyalty and gaming systems, because they are at the heart of our business model. We had to be sure that these systems could be protected against any possibility of failure. By using VMware HA, our virtual machines are always available.” Charles Rayer – London Clubs International
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