OSIS turns to VMware

OSIS migrated from Microsoft Hyper-V 2008 and 2012 to VMware vSphere with Operations Management 6 beginning in October 2014.

"Delivering high application uptime is key for our health center clients who rely on us for securely hosting their electronic health record systems," said Rob Frilling, Infrastructure Team Lead and Senior Virtualization Engineer, OSIS. "Since switching to VMware, we have had zero unscheduled or scheduled downtime at the virtual infrastructure level."

OSIS Proactively Addresses Issues Before they Occur with VMware

Based in Cincinnati, Ohio, OSIS is a 501(c)(3) non-profit technology services organization that currently serves 38 health centers -- touching more than 700,000 patient lives in more than 400 locations -- in 17 states across the country. In addition to specializing in the implementation, customization, optimization, training and ongoing support for NextGen Healthcare's Electronic Practice Management (EPM) and Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems, OSIS provides a wide range of advisory services and IT support customized to the unique demands of health centers. From Health Information Exchange (HIE) to PCMH certification and reporting to Revenue Cycle Management optimization -- and everything in between -- OSIS empowers health centers to focus on patient care, maximize their technology investments, and meet the reporting compliance that is necessary for funding and financial incentives.

Initially, OSIS selected VMware vSphere with Operations Management for its reliability, performance and management qualities. Since completing deployment of its new virtual environment in January 2015, OSIS has improved application performance, service levels and availability through the use of VMware vSphere® Distributed Resource Scheduler™, VMware vSphere® High Availability, VMware® vSphere vMotion and VMware vSphere® Storage vMotion®. OSIS has also virtualized business-critical applications such as Microsoft Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server to benefit from the performance and availability provided by VMware vSphere with Operations Management.

Beyond achieving improvements to application and infrastructure uptime, OSIS is using VMware vSphere with Operations Management to gain deeper insight into its virtual environment. According to the OSIS IT staff, they can now easily view and take action to right size their clients' environments as necessary through the operations dashboard provided by vSphere with Operations Management. The IT staff can now also anticipate when to add more hard drives, CPUs and memory to the systems that require them through the advanced capacity planning capabilities of the platform.

In February 2015, OSIS upgraded to VMware vRealize Operations Insight to extend the intelligent operations management capabilities beyond VMware vSphere to operating systems, physical servers, storage as well as networking hardware. The unified management solution also takes advantage of a marketplace of wide-ranging extensions for third-party tools such as HP OneView. The OSIS IT staff has deployed the HP 3PAR StoreServ management pack which provides standard and custom dashboards, reports, alerts and remediation actions for their storage array directly within their operations dashboard.

Additionally, the IT staff deployed VMware vRealize Log Insight™, which is bundled with VMware vRealize Operations Insight. With the real-time log management solution in place, the staff is now capable of correlating events across the IT environment through the use of real-time monitoring, search, and log analytics coupled with a dashboard for stored queries, reports, and alerts.

Since switching to VMware vSphere with Operations Management, and upgrading to VMware vRealize Operations Insight, OSIS reports that it has achieved the following additional benefits:

• Increased memory utilization of all virtual machines, which can now be oversubscribed on each host by about 20 percent without a negative performance impact
• Decreased the time spent on diagnostics and problem resolution
• Decreased its hardware footprint by almost 25 percent
• Gained the ability to perform no downtime maintenance on all production hosts.