Maintenance Plan - Overview

This faq describes the maintenance plan for IT Infrastructure of the Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School

Maintenance Window

For you, your work and our customers and partners and to ensure high availability and continuing quality of service, IT Services has introduced a fixed maintenance window for networking equipment and servers.

When? every Wednesday between 8.00 and 12.00.

During the fixed maintenance window, there may be a temporary loss of services across part of, or the entire range of services provided by IT Services. In this case, you are notified via email in advance of system down time during the week prior to the maintenance procedure. Additionally, a maintenance alert is placed in the Altiris Helpdesk system.

If you believe that a scheduled fixed maintenance window is likely to have a significant and adverse affect on your activities, please contact the ICT & Operations Service Desk, at helpdesk@vlerick.be not less than 2 working days prior to the fixed maintenance period in question to discuss the matter further.

Together with Logistics, IT will check proactive the activities during this maintenance period to guarantee a normal operation of these activities.

It should be noted that unavoidable (emergency) downtime can occur as a result of hardware faults at almost any time. Such events are rare, however when they do occur IT Services will provide as much notice to users as possible and work to resolve the fault as quickly as possible.

Even though the maintenance period calls for four hours, interruptions to customers are typically brief. Customers are notified via email in advance of system down time during the week prior to the maintenance procedure. Additionally, a maintenance alert is placed in the Altiris Helpdesk system.

Background

Periodic maintenance on IT systems is mandatory. Here are some of the reasons why:

  • Installation of security patches
  • Hardware upgrades
  • Software patches and upgrades
  • Software and component installations
  • Re-configurations
  • Server reboots
  • Availability and fail-over testing

These are preventive measures that are essential to provide stable and secure systems for the Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School. Maintenance usually lasts anywhere from four hours to over seven or eight hours when problems are identified. Many times, if a server is going to fail, it will happen during the reboots that are required during maintenance.

Justification

This proposal seeks to satisfy the following criteria:

Suitable vendor support.

Availability of experienced engineers is only possible during working days. Since risks and the resulting need for support is highest during maintenance procedures (e.g. system reboots, patch installation and software upgrades), maintenance should be scheduled during daytime hours to minimize downtime.

Minimize service interruption to customers.

Although the maintenance is scheduled for a four hour time period, interruption to customers is brief for several reasons.

  • Maintenance on each individual server may last from five to 20 minutes on average. The plan schedules four hours due to the total number of servers being maintained.
  • The level of redundancy inherent in the current infrastructure allows support personnel to perform maintenance on one or more servers while other servers continue to provide services to customers. Examples of this include authentication servers.

Sufficient time to complete maintenance and resolve problems when they occur.

When problems during maintenance may occur, a maintenance schedule on Wednesday gives the IT team sufficient time to resolve the problem. It also guarantees the availability of external, experienced engineers.

Avoid schedule conflicts with database and system backups.

All system and database backups run during the evening and night. This includes email and file systems. The logical time to avoid schedule conflicts with backups is in the morning after backups have completed.

Avoid academic and administrative calendar conflicts.

IT Services will attempt where possible to ensure that the maintenance does not happen during important periods of the Academic year.

It should be noted that unavoidable (emergency) downtime can occur as a result of hardware faults at almost any time. Such events are rare, however when they do occur IT Services will provide as much notice to users as possible and work to resolve the fault as quickly as possible.

A single consolidated maintenance period for all IT systems and networking.

A weekly maintenance period will eliminate confusion for customers, minimize the number of service disruptions, and provide coordination for the IT team.


Author: DVSM\rafnou | Modified by: DVSM\wimpou, Tuesday October 13, 2009 17:26:55 +0200