Employees are progressively returning to the office to work, whether temporarily or permanently. As businesses prepare for the day when life will return to normal, IT professionals must evaluate how the change will affect their IT infrastructure and what they can do to prepare, even as the COVID-19 epidemic continues.
Do you know how this return to the office will affect your IT systems? Following the steps provided in this pandemic return-to-work checklist for hyper-converged infrastructure is one approach to find out and become better prepared.
In reaction to the coronavirus epidemic, some IT departments either shut down or drastically reduced the workload of their hyper-converged systems to save resources. Meanwhile, many others deployed new hyper-converged systems or repurposed existing hyper-converged nodes to bear the weight of the year’s increased work-from-home requirements. They introduced new hyper-converged systems to serve as the primary data center support for considerably enlarged or freshly adopted virtual desktop infrastructures, for example.
The performance impact on hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) running mission-critical workloads may be modest, given that those systems remained to operate at regular capacity while employees worked remotely. However, these hyper-converged systems may have been neglected due to a lack of on-site IT professionals to maintain them for an extended length of time. Other HCI platforms, such as those used in branch offices or DevOps/testing environments, may have been idle for several months.
In any case, it is critical to examine the state of your hyper-converged infrastructure and undertake a series of preventative maintenance chores in preparation for personnel returning to the workplace. What you should do is as follows.
- Examine for hardware flaws
The first thing you should do is run a hardware health check, especially if the hyper-converged system hasn’t been utilized in a while. Check to see if the system is issuing any alarms linked to failed or anticipated hardware issues.
- Check the storage’s health.
Check to see if system storage is working properly as part of assessing the health of an HCI platform’s hardware. Look for things like RAID arrays that have already seen a disc failure or mirror sets that have become out of sync.
- Examine storage utilization
As part of your pandemic return-to-work checklist, you should also verify the storage of your hyper-converged infrastructure. This will help ensure that none of your volumes run out of space. Check system volumes as well as volumes devoted to applications, data, or virtual machines.
Furthermore, if you haven’t had the opportunity to monitor storage utilization in a while, it’s a good idea to double-check that the storage consumption rate is still in line with your pre-pandemic capacity planning projections when validating storage utilization.
A hyper-converged system that has been inactive for a few months or more is likely to have a storage consumption rate that is significantly lower than the initial estimate. However, for some systems, the fact that practically everything is now done online (rather than in person) may result in significantly increased storage use. In any case, determine how rapidly your available storage is being depleted.
- Patch Management
Another important step in the HCI inspection is to ensure that your hyper-converged nodes have the necessary patches installed. This clearly applies to OS changes, but there are a few more things to look at. For example, ensure that your HCI nodes have the most recent hardware drivers loaded. If your HCI vendor has published new firmware updates, make sure to install them as well (both for compute and storage hardware).
- Software Updates
Assessing the health of a hyper-convergence platform also entails ensuring that all health and management software running on the platform is up to date. This includes native monitoring software, monitoring agents, antivirus software, backup agents, and any security software that is installed on the HCI nodes.
- Conduct a security audit.
Spend some time evaluating the platform’s security. Examine the event logs for items such as account creations, attempted logins (particularly into privileged accounts), and unauthorized configuration modifications.
- Conduct a stress test.
If a hyper-converged infrastructure platform has been inactive (or powered off) for an extended period of time, it is a good idea to run a hardware stress test to ensure the hardware is ready for active duty. A stress test entails subjecting your hyper-converged hardware to a heavy load using a tool (there are numerous free choices available). This will ensure that the hardware operates as planned. While key components rarely fail as a result of inaction, fans, for example, do occasionally stop working. As a result, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on the servers during the stress test to make sure they don’t overheat.
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