The Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) provides centrally managed hosting solutions for OSU colleges and departments housed in secure data center environments.  A Virtual Server runs its own copy of its operating system providing independence from other customers in the Virtual Service Environment generally at lower cost than a physical dedicated server.  Customers can then install almost any software that runs on the supported Operating System (OS).

The Office of the CIO offers virtual server hosting using Microsoft Windows or Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

• Consulting and design of virtual servers to ensure the proposed virtual server is right-sized, using the correct OS for the customer needs.
• Build of a standard virtual server with supported operating systems
• Licensing for supported operating systems.  (OCIO retains the license for the OS)
• 30 GB of storage/disk space dedicated to the operating system
• One (1) virtual Central Processing Unit (CPU)
• 1 virtual GB RAM
• Support of the physical infrastructure for the virtual server environment in an OCIO Data Center
• Backup of Operating System, installed software, and data
  • 7 days / week
  • 30 day retention of backups
• Server Administration and Maintenance, includes:
  • Patch and update management
  • Logging
  • Server reboots and restartarting of services during published university business hours
  • Server Incident Management

• Additional storage/disk space: Various storage options available; please contact us for assistance
• Additional CPU:  up to 4 total per Virtual Server 
• Additional RAM: up to 8GB total per Virtual Server
  

One time charges: 

• Rebuilding or re-configuring an existing server:  $80/hour.  A quotation will be provided.
• Assistance outside published university business hours may be subject to billing:  $120/hour, minimum 1 hour

Recurring Monthly Charges:

• Basic Virtual Server (see What's Included section above): $110 per server per month

• Options:
  Additional Storage/disk space (pricing varies based on storage option selected)
  Additional virtual CPU: $65 per CPU per month (max of 4 per Virtual Server)
  Additional virtual RAM:  $20 per GB per month (max of 8 GB per Virtual Server)

OSU departments and colleges

To schedule a consultation regarding building the virtual server to meet your needs, contact the OCIO IT Service Desk at 614-688-4357 (8-4357 from a campus telephone).

One-time charges are billed at the end of the month in which they are incurred.  Monthly charges are billed at the end of each month, and are based on a snapshot of the virtual CPU, allocated storage, and virtual RAM included in the Virtual Server configuration.  The snapshot is taken on the 25th day of the month.

Common Service Information & Service Level Targets: Apply to all OCIO IT Services. 

Service Hours and Availability: The Virtual Server system architecture is designed to be highly available to the customers.  The virtual server is available to the customer unit 24/7/365 with the exception of maintenance windows.

The standard OCIO maintenance window is 12:01am – 3:00am Sundays. However, maintenance windows in other time slots can be negotiated with the OCIO.  Customers and Users should not expect to be able to use the service within the maintenance window time slot. Requirements for service availability during a maintenance window need to be negotiated with the OCIO Service Level staff.   OCIO staff will advise the customer when it will be necessary to use the maintenance window, as well as in the case of any emergency time period the server must be unavailable.

It is the customer department or college responsibility to advise their users of any unavailability for the services running on the virtual server.

OCIO systems staff support for the virtual servers is available during published University business hours. 

Monitoring and Reporting:

Microsoft Windows:  To enable diagnostics, the OCIO systems staff is able to provide the customer with snapshots of up to one hour at a time of the performance and usage of a virtual server.   In addition, the systems staff can provide monitoring and automated notification to the customer regarding memory on the disk, I/O, and available drive space.  Monitoring thresholds and notification methods can be arranged between the OCIO systems staff to meet customer needs.  

Red Hat Linux: Monitoring is used by the OCIO System Administrators to confirm the health and availability of the server.

• 2-factor Authentication (BuckeyePass) is required to access virtual server system administration tools.