Enterprise Virtualization Deployment — Top-tier Pakistani Commercial Bank
Replaced an end-of-life two-site virtualization estate for a top-tier Pakistani commercial bank with a dual-site VMware vSphere 8 + PowerStore + Nexus EVPN-VXLAN platform — without missing a single trading-day SLA.
Challenge
- Existing eight-year-old VMware 6.7 cluster on aging blade chassis at primary and DR sites, well past extended support and missing patches for known CVEs.
- Storage replication latency had crept above the SBP-aligned RPO targets after capacity growth.
- Renewal of expired warranty, vSphere licensing under the new Broadcom model, and storage refresh — all hitting the same procurement cycle.
- Zero tolerance for trading-day disruption; cutovers restricted to weekend windows with strict rollback bridges.
Solution
- Two-site VMware vSphere 8 design with VCF licensing reset against the new socket / core model, optimized for the bank's VM density.
- Dell PowerEdge R760 anchor hosts + R660 compute nodes pre-staged at our Lahore facility with iDRAC9 / OpenManage Enterprise, firmware-harmonized.
- Dell PowerStore 9200T at each site with synchronous Metro replication, dedupe + compression and Safeguarded Snapshots for ransomware resilience.
- Cisco Nexus 9300-FX3 spine-leaf VXLAN-EVPN fabric across both sites with 100 GbE ISL — replacing the legacy three-tier fabric.
- Phased migration: 30-VM pilot weekend, then 4 production waves of 80–120 VMs each, with vMotion / Storage vMotion and a one-cluster rollback bridge through the entire cutover.
Hardware used
- Dell PowerEdge R760 (anchor) × 8
- Dell PowerEdge R660 (compute) × 24
- Dell PowerStore 9200T × 2 (with Metro replication)
- Cisco Nexus 9336C-FX2 spine × 4
- Cisco Nexus 93180YC-FX3 leaf × 12
- VMware vSphere 8 Foundation + VCF licensing
- Dell ProSupport Plus Mission-Critical 4-hr × 5 years
Business outcome
100 % migration completed across 4 weekend windows — zero trading-day disruption.
Replication latency restored to within SBP-aligned RPO targets; storage IOPS headroom up ~3.5×.
Five-year warranty + Mission-Critical 4-hour parts SLA registered at both sites.
Operations toolchain consolidated on OpenManage Enterprise + vCenter + vRealize — reduced day-2 effort by ~30 %.
Architecture documented end-to-end with as-built diagrams handed to internal IT and the regulator.
Architecture summary
Dual-site VMware vSphere 8 cluster on Dell PowerEdge R760 / R660 hosts, dual Dell PowerStore 9200T arrays in synchronous Metro mode over 100 GbE DCI, Cisco Nexus VXLAN-EVPN spine-leaf at each site with multi-site EVPN, and out-of-band iDRAC management on a dedicated VLAN.
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