Queries on rft for Tender for eCabinet Server Virtualisation

Question 1

Are you looking for a software to manage the virtual assets?

Answer:

Section 3.2 New Virtualised Server and Storage Infrastructure states:

At this stage the Department may or may not implement a separate virtualised infrastructure control facility. The centralised management software tools for the virtualisation platform must be included in the proposal but as an option. If this happens, the Department would either implement this as a virtual server or run the software on an existing server (such as the server than runs CommVault) or run the software on a new low cost server.

Depending on factors such as software cost, implementation cost, resource requirements and usefulness, the Department may opt to acquire this optional solution component. The Department would expect such as management and administration tool to provide facilities such as:

Availability management
Resource management and allocation
Security and access control
Task scheduling
Monitoring and alerting
Centralised management, administration and control
Automated power management
Patch management
Server provisioning
Reporting

If vendors are proposing this option, they should briefly describe the functionality being provided and the benefits to the Department.

Question 2

Are you looking for management software to work with virtualisation eg. from one centralised point being able to manage both physical and virtual assets from one screen.

Answer:

See the response to question 1 above.

Question 3

Will you also be looking at a management tool for vmware in order to manage both your virtual and physical assets together?

Answer:

See the response to question 1 above.

Question 4

As I’m sure you are aware, this project can be undertaken in many different ways, the main constraint on the implementation is usually the department’s budget. Are you able to give a rough indication of the allocated budget for this project? If not, would you be able to indicate whether you are leaning towards a system with optimal performance, or rather a cost effective solution?

Answer:

The Department cannot provide an indication of the budget available. In evaluating responses, cost will play an important factor.

We are looking for servers with the following resources:

Dual Quad Core (or greater) CPUs. All processors must be 64 bit with multi-core and virtualisation support
64 GB ECC RAM. DIMM slots should be used in the most cost effective manner possible to allow future expansion

The Department feels that such servers will offer optimal performance. The Department is looking for three servers initially with the option to acquire additional servers either now or in the future.

Question 5

Answer:

This is a duplicate of question 4.

Question 6

It there any preference on disk or RAID configuration to provide 5Tb usable disk storage space.

Answer:

As indicated in section 6. Appendix 1 - Server Configuration Details of the tender document, the current disk space utilisation of the servers whose new equivalents will be virtualised is quite low.

The Department would expect that the iSCSI SAN component of the overall solution would support some or all of RAID levels 0, 2, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10 (0+1), 50 (0+5) providing a balance of redundant hardware with automatic failover and improved performance.

Vendors are free to recommend a configuration that delivers optimum performance, reliability, available space in a cost-effective manner.

Vendors may want to include a table that shows classifies each RAID option available for their storage solution in terms of usage space, performance and reliability that would allow easy comparison.

Question 7

In the RTF document page 18, in reference to "Implementation of a separate virtualised infrastructure control facility" , can you indicate what services or monitor features that are required. Is this reference to the virtual environment management console

Answer:

See the response to question 1 above.