welcome to educause southeast regional conference 2007 navigating the rapids of campus technology...

Welcome to EDUCAUSESoutheast Regional

Conference 2007

Navigating the Rapidsof Campus Technology

Monday, June 11, 20072:15 PM

Managing Infrastructure with Virtual ServersJohn Robbins – jorobbins@davidson.edu

David Link – dalink@davidson.edu

VMware

Who wants it?Why do we have it?

Success Stories

• Exchange 2007 Edge deployment in an afternoon

• Test Environment is much improved

Davidson College’s environment

• 19 – Dell PowerEdge 2950’s• 8 – Dell PowerEdge 2850’s• 15 – Dell PowerEdge 2650’s• 15 – Dell PowerEdge 2550’s• 5 – HP-UX servers for Oracle• 55 – Virtual Guest OS systems• 1 – EVA 5000

Your environment

• Who is running ESX now?• Microsoft anyone?

Davidson’s VM environment

• 8 VMware ESX 3.0.1 servers• Three production, three DMZ, and two test /

development servers• 60 virtual servers• Dell PE 2950, 16 GB RAM, disk

(mirror/hotspare/15K)• Virtual servers have 18 GB OS drives on SAN

shared storage – 400 GB chunks

Demo

How to deploy a virtual server?How long does it take?Can you drink that cup of coffee?

VMotion Demo

• Can you just move a server from one hardware platform to another?

• My hardware failed what do I do? I have 30 virtual servers on that one piece of hardware?

• What happens when I go home for the day?

64-bit Support

Can you VMotion between Servers?

Can’t VMotion now what?

• You can always Migrate to a new host.• Migrate can move from old hardware to new

hardware• It can also move from an old disk drive to a

new disk drive.• When VMotion can’t do what you want, try to

Migrate.

Thank you for coming

• Before you go we should clean up.• How do I remove a virtual machine?

Questions?

• John Robbins – Senior System Analystjorobbins@davidson.edu704-894-2435

• David Link – System Analystdalink@davidson.edu704-894-2507

How to get the best performance

• Give the guest OS enough memory• Make sure you have the latest version of VMware Tools• Disable screen savers• Disable unused devices– CD-ROM Driver– Floppy Drives– LPT Ports– COM Ports– USB Devices

• Schedule backups, Anti-virus, and defragmenters to run in off hours