Setting up Cluster of Dedicated Servers for a Forex Trading Training Institute to Build & Sell Forex VPS Hosting
About the Project
The client runs online forex trading training institute. They provide standard education to those who aspire to become successful traders. Various courses are offered to help you meet your aspiration of achieving trading goals.
Experienced dedicated mentors are deployed by them to guide you through this course enabling you to achieve your carrier objectives. Their analysts have years of experience in trading and offered courses will help students to make strategies to stay mentally tough.
THE PROBLEM
They were looking to host VPS servers for their students. For that they required large number of servers to host virtual machines. Each of their student would have different requirements for their VPS needs. They are planning on offering 5 tiers ranging from 2 core / 2 GB RAM / 40GB HDD to 10 core / 10 GB RAM / 200GB HDD. They were anticipating an initial 12-month rollout of 1500 students. The individual servers they would need to lease would be Dual CPU XEON Silver 16 core / 256 GB RAM / 4 X 3 TB HDD (RAID10). With this configuration, they would need a total of 33 servers spun up at intervals throughout the 12-month rollout. While port speed can be limited (to some extent), they would need unlimited traffic in and out since the student's VPS's would hold constant connections to their respective brokers. The software their students use is Windows only, so they would need the Host OS to be Windows Server 2016 DC on each VPS. They would also need an IPv4 address for each VPS they spin up so that each student has no knowledge that other students are on the server and isolated access to their respective VPS. They would like the 'Host' side of things to be managed by our team while they would manage the actual server services and Hyper-V console.
Their requirement at a glance :
| Total number of servers required | 33 Windows Dedicated Server |
| Total number of VMs | 1500+ Forex VPS with OS Licenses and Dedicated IPS addresses on each VMs |
| User access | Isolate user access to their respective VPS only |
| Required bandwidth | Unlimited |
| Raid version | RAID 10 |
| Any other tool | VM monitoring tool / Standard template to provision new VPS |
| System update | Uninterrupted Windows update |
| VPS management script | Powershell script to manage VPS |
OUR SOLUTION
Such a high-end solution requires a dedicated team with years of experience. Upon receiving clients' requirements, our team quickly got in action and provided the best, affordable, and secured solution. In order to achieve a redundant solution, We offered a cluster of servers with N+1 redundancy. It means in case if one server has failed, VMs can be migrated to a new host safely. The migration of a Forex VPS from a failed node to an active node is in live environment and no reboot required. Additional components being offered were also redundant, like dual power supplies fed and high supported Nimble SAN storage with triple parity RAID and highly available storage controllers.
Server Configuration :
| OS | Windows 2019 Datacenter Edition |
| Processor | AMD EPYC 7402P 24 Physical cores per node @ 2.8GHz (67.2GHz) |
| Memory | 256 GB DDR4 |
| Storage | SAMSUNG 240 GB SSD + Hybrid SAN Storage total 6TB + other 6 TB replication storage |
ConnectWise RMM tool :
ConnectWise Control is used to view all 33 servers and their VMs in one console and to manage them. Clients IT staff has access to this tool. It is partially web based and partially thick client. Using connectwise client can monitor the health of individual VMs, manage the anti-virus tools, connect each VM from one console and also run scripts and commands across all VMs.
BitDefender Anti Virus :
We provided BitDefender antivirus tool to protect his server against viruses and malware. Bitdefender will provide the security like web security, anti-phishing, anti-fraud, safe files and rescue mode etc.
Active Directory Domain Service :
We provided ADDS to facilitate an effective user management system in his server environment. Our team built the domain controllers and harden them by applying CIS Benchmark security templates. Also, delegated the subdomain to name servers so they can be authoritative for the domain.
Base Template Configuration:
We prepared base template of 2016 operating system with a broker installer file (.exe) in a directory and appllied all Windows security updates and also harden the OS using CIS Benchmark. Client can use this template to prepare new virtual machines for his students.
Additional Features :
Additionally,, we arranged weekly cadence call to discuss any issue, delivered powershell script to get the list of all the offline and suspended VMs. Power-shell script can automatically start the offline VMs and added security like MFA with google authenticator to access their account.
THE RESULTS
Client was agreed with our solution and currently running servers with the features we mentioned above. We have allocated dedicated team members to handle any of queries we receive from this client.