LNA Santé is a leading organization in the management of temporary and permanent dependency. Our establishments offer patients and the elderly a support model that reconciles individualized projects in a reassuring collective environment. LNA Santé now has nearly 70 establishments across France and Belgium (EHPAD, SSR, Psychiatric Clinic, MRS, HAD); nearly 6,000 employees and more than 900 liberal health professionals. LNA Santé’s infrastructure department is currently formed of a Production and Support Director, an Infrastructure Systems division, a Networks and Security division, and a Support division. Our infrastructure is 100% virtualization under VMware, with around 400 virtual machines, and around 20 hosts.
I discovered EasyVirt during a VMUG France (VMware User Group). This User Group of which I belong is an independent organization run by VMware end-users. Its objective is to exchange knowledge, experience, and best practices around VMware solutions. It was during this event that I learned about DC Scope®. I immediately saw an interest in it, particularly around the capacity planning module. We now have reliable information on virtual machines added, removed, or deactivated and we know our actual rate of use across different clusters. This is not the only resource in the tool, we also use troubleshooting a lot. It quickly identifies degrading virtual machines and their RAM, CPU, and Disk counters. The tool even lets us know the source of the problems and when they occurred.
Capacity planning is the key element that seduced us from DC Scope®. Today we can view the values and status of each resource allocated and consumed according to the dates we selected. We are informed about saturation dates and can even consider different scenarios. We are becoming more efficient.
With DC Scope®, we also have the possibility of knowing how much our virtual machines and our projects are costing us. We can justify our investments using reliable indicators.
The time saved is considerable on the modeling of the budget and thanks to the tracking in the evolution of virtual machines, the use of processors, rams, hosts, storage… I used to spend about 10 days analyzing and processing these data, today I only need 2 days with beautiful automatic graphs that illustrate the whole activity! Out of 400 virtual machines, 10 have been deleted and 15 are now shut down to be deleted soon. As part of our hyper-convergence projects, DC Scope® will also allow us to better quantify the number of nodes used in the event of a Disaster Recovery on a second site and thus optimize the total cost of ownership of the infrastructure.
This product is very intuitive and easy to use compared to others. The development team is attentive to needs. It’s nice to be listened to by the developer of the solution. They are really focused on the user experience. This is still a strong point. I encourage anyone who has to drive virtualization platforms under VMware to take an interest in this solution.