The Engineering IT Shared Services Infrastructure team is partnering with Technology Services to reduce the amount of time we spend on duplicate services. This partnership will allow us to be more flexible to address college-specific needs instead of running nearly identical services to those offered by Tech Services. Our first partnership is the virtual machine (VM) space.
We will begin migrating VM workloads to Technology Services starting Thursday June 8, 2023. We expect little to no disruption during this migration, The current schedule of which machines are moving and when can be found here https://go.illinois.edu/GCOE_VM_Migration_Phase1 and will be updated periodically.
Potential impact:
While we do not anticipate any disruptions to your work, there is a possibility that you may experience a problem connecting to a mapped drive (directories that do not reside on your computer). If you experience any problems or have questions, please email: engrit-help@illinois.edu or call 217-333-1313.
FAQs about our partnership with Technology Services
What is happening?
We are partnering with Technology Service on how to optimize and consolidate enterprise systems (virtualization, storage, and backups) so that they are offered in a confident, efficient, and scalable manner. These partnerships will create capacity within our Infrastructure team. The first part of this partnership is consolidating our virtual environments (VMs). This will be done in phases, all workloads living on our virtual cluster in the Siebel data center will move first.
Why is this happening?
In order to better serve the Grainger College of Engineering, we have identified some services (virtualization, storage, and backups) that can be run by larger services providers with more efficiency. We will still be your point of contact for these services, to ensure you get the support you need. By not running these services ourselves, we have more capacity to focus on specialized computing needs within the college.
When is this migration taking place?
Machines are scheduled to start moving Thursday 6/8/2023 and the current schedule that includes which group machines are assigned to can be found here https://go.illinois.edu/GCOE_VM_Migration_Phase1
What should we expect during and after the migration?
You should see little to no disruption as the bulk of this work will take place during our regular maintenance windows (Monday thru Friday, 5am-7am CST) when completing the switch over for machines. You may however in some cases need to remount shared drives. Please contact us at engrit-help@illinois.edu or 217-333-1313 if you run into any issues or need assistance.
Will our billing for VMs change?
The billing procedure will change and we should see some cost savings in VM billing. Prices for Tech Services VMs can be found here https://help.uillinois.edu/TDClient/42/UIUC/Requests/ServiceDet?ID=185
How do we request VMs moving forward?
You can still send a message to engrit-help-infrastructure@illinois.edu to request VM creations and support, or you can submit your request directly to Tech Services using this link: http://go.illinois.edu/vmrequest