The Municipality of Hardenberg is one of the largest municipalities in the province of Overijssel in terms of area. More than 60,000 residents live spread over an area of more than 30,000 hectares. From online contact to support at the counter: within the municipality, a team of 18 ICT employees ensures that some 600 colleagues are able to provide good service to residents. All these activities place very high demands on the ICT infrastructure. This foundation must be available, secure and flexible enough to ensure that the municipality can function optimally. To ensure this endeavor also in the long term, Hardenberg, together with ICT partner PQR, set up a future-proof ICT infrastructure based on VMware vSAN and NSX.
The Municipality of Hardenberg likes to be at the forefront of using modern technology. Stefan Breukelman, network and system administrator at Hardenberg Municipality says: “Technology is not a goal in itself. The goal is to help our residents quickly and well, at the counter and online. In order to achieve this, we want to facilitate our employees as well as possible, and we are constantly looking for the best technology to do this. We have already opted for server virtualization at the back-end. And when we moved to the new town hall in 2012, we also switched to desktop virtualization on the front-end with Horizon from VMware.”
The challenge
Hardenberg’s ICT infrastructure not only supports its own organization, The municipality of Ommen also uses Hardenberg’s ICT services. Breukelman: “The storage, including the hosts, for our front-end needed replacing. Performance was declining and support was expiring. This partly caused the user experience to decline. Particularly in Ommen, users were experiencing slow desktops.” In parallel with this process, the municipality wanted to replace the back-end storage. It too was at the end of its life cycle. Breukelman explains: “In this situation, we made a conscious decision to get our ICT infrastructure ready for the future again. We wanted to solve the delays, while modernizing to ensure a scalable, high-availability, secure and redundant environment. By extension, easy management and realistic costs also played an important role in this project.”
The solution
In consultation with VMware partner PQR, Hardenberg organized workshops on requirements and needs for the new front- and back-end environment. Breukelman: “PQR had made a good impression in previous projects with a skilled and fast approach. It was clear that they could link technological knowledge and experience to the requirements we set as a municipality. In the workshops, we set a dot on the horizon with them.”
After an inventory of requirements and capabilities, it appeared that a hyper converged infrastructure best matched Hardenberg’s requirements. Subsequently, PQR created a high-level design. “Together we set up a new front-end environment with new servers and VMware vSAN. Subsequently, a virtual desktop infrastructure was set up with VMware Horizon.” A VMware vSAN stretched cluster was chosen for the back-end. The servers, networking and storage are available in two locations. The data from the VMs is replicated via vSAN so that they are back up and running quickly in the event of an outage. Thus, for the Municipality of Hardenberg there is now redundancy without additional products and on the basis of simple, central management.
The result
The implementation is divided into two phases. First, the front-end was revamped. Breukelman: “For us as a municipality, it is very important to keep up with the digital transformation that not only users but also our citizens expect from us. At the same time, we also wanted our users themselves to experience as little disruption as possible from our modernization. And we succeeded. The storage is now very scalable and the new environment is significantly faster. The user experience, especially in Ommen, has greatly improved. All users connect to the data center in Hardenberg and Ommen is the fallback location. This allows the municipality to continue working as usual in the event of a failure or calamity. This approach has already proven itself in practice. After a disaster some time ago, we managed to switch over within half an hour. As a result, the disruption was minimal.” Another benefit of the new infrastructure is security. “We now know for sure that we are providing the functionality securely. This applies to both application access and data flows within the system. The choice of VMware NSX enables microsegmentation, which automatically sets up security policies at the VM level. Microsegmentation splits the IT environment into smaller parts to make it easier to manage, on the one hand, and to limit damage in the event of an intrusion and/or infection, on the other. The infected part can thus be quickly isolated from the rest, and prevent problems caused by negligence or deliberate hacking attempts.”
The Software Defined strategy based on virtual servers, networking and storage for the back-end also offers Hardenberg several advantages. Breukelman: “The replacement and expansion of our compute, networking and storage offers much more than extra capacity and performance. The management is merged and the centralized approach gives us a better grip on the management of the various components. All this without losing control of the environment. The higher availability and redundancy ensure that unplanned downtime is minimal. Moreover, we can now do maintenance even during working hours. This has no effect whatsoever on the user experience. With the new environment, we can optimally support everyone within the municipality. The desired ICT infrastructure is available flexibly, quickly, securely and automatically.”
Looking to the future
Municipality of Hardenberg is constantly on the move. “We must continue to anticipate new developments, in municipal land and technology. For example, a migration to Windows 10 is scheduled for the end of 2019. At that time, together with PQR, we will re-examine the front-end. Windows 10 requires more resources to ensure the same performance and availability for end users. In any case, with our current ICT infrastructure, we know for sure that we can develop along with it relatively easily and expand if necessary. In this way we guarantee that the employees of the municipality have all the resources they need to maintain the highest level of service to the residents of Hardenberg and Ommen.”
