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How to Deploy VMWare Moderate cost 10 to 100 VMs

Presented by:

Bob Gawne Technology Operations Manager

Gradient Analytics

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Contact Information• Bob Gawne

– Technology Operations Manger• Ph: 480 998-8585 ext 239• Email: rgawne@gradientanalytics.com

• Rob Cooley– Operations Specialist III

• Ph: 480 998-8585 ext 256• Email: rcooley@gradientanalytics.com

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My Background• Retired Marine 21 yrs

• Started out with Gradient in 2000 as the single IT support tech.– 30 users and 6 servers.– I get to be a Jack of all trades and hardly

get to master any of them.

• A+, Net +, Security + Certified

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Company Background• Gradient Analytics was founded in 1996. Our founders are world-

renowned academicians, who have published in leading finance, economic, and accounting academic journals. Their academic work provides the starting point for many of Gradient's alpha-generating quantitative factors and the foundation for Gradient's company-specific research work delivered by industry-leading analysts.

• From 1996 to 2002, Gradient developed predictive models, expert systems, and analytical tools for asset managers and investment advisors. Today, Gradient distributes many related products exclusively through strategic alliances with partners such as Thomson Financial and MSN/CNBC Money (via the StockScouter rating system). Other intellectual property includes a proven proprietary stock and portfolio performance system that is used to test and monitor stock ratings and to measure the performance of both mutual funds and hedge funds

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Company Background• What I say we are…….• Technology based company• Very unique 35 – 50 local users and 3-6

remote users with an Enterprise class server room of 50+ servers and an IT support staff of 2

• Total Production Storage requirements of about 10 Tb

• Total Storage including Disk to Disk back 27TB

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What is a moderate Cost?

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What is a moderate Cost?• For the purpose of this presentation lets

define “moderate cost” as under $250,000 to build a Virtual Infrastructure foundation that can support up to 100 Virtual host.

• This cost is based on Virtualization Software, 3rd party support software and the hardware to support a Virtual Infrastructure.

• It does not include OS licenses, database license, etc… – But I will share a secret….

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Server Infrastructure• 6 Production SQL Servers• 2 Production Sybase Servers• 14 Production Application Servers• 2 FTP Servers• 3 Linux Mail Servers• 2 Production Web Servers• 4 Domain Controllers• 3 File Servers

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Server Infrastructure (Cont)• 3 Development SQL Servers

• 1 Development Sybase Servers

• 6 Development Application Servers

• 1 Dev FTP Servers

• 2 Development Web Servers

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Our Virtualization Story• CFO says to me one day…

• I want you to price out a complete DR site….

• My Response was, “Can we shore up our primary site first?”

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Build our own Server Room• Power/UPS, Racks & UPS Support

Software $ 95,000• Electrician Support $ 2,300• A/C Install $15,000• Fire Protection $15,000• $ 127,300 + the cost to build the room• Total Approaching: $254,600.00

– Does not include Generator or A/C maintenance.

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Move Production Off-Site

• 10 x 10 Cage off site $ 3,200• 6 20 amp power feeds $ 1,500• Generator backup & UPS• No A/C head aches• Security Guard on site 24/7• Biometric Security• $ Priceless but we only have to pay• $4,700 per month

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We Still need to purchase Servers!

• Both the server room & Offsite cage options & cost are only for the infrastructure to support additional servers.

• It does not include the cost of purchasing additional servers!!!

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Server Cost• 20 New servers @ apx $7,000 each

– $ 140,000

• Offsite location to support them $4,700 per Month

• Total Cost: Apx $4,000 a month lease payment for 3 yr on top of $4,700

• Ouch that’s $104,400 a year

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Best of Both Worlds

• Virtualize our servers• This would shrink our off site

requirements to 1 rack in the off site data center $ 1,500 a month

• Reduce the number of servers in our existing server room

• Reduce the number of servers we need to purchase and maintain from this point forward.

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The Virtual Challenge• Our thinking at the time was to put a virtual

solution in place, start out small and build on as we get comfortable. (Phase 1)

• We had a lot of single purpose servers that utilization was only a couple of hours a night. – (1st to virtualize)

• We also have some big heavy hitters that required lots of storage & I/O (Phase 2)– Last to virtualize

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The Virtual Challenge• The Environment put in place needed to

shore up our current Disaster Recovery response time in both:– Recovery Time Objective (RTO) – Recovery Point Objective (RPO).

• If Phase 1 failed I was probably going to be out of a job.

• With the above in mind… and a starting budget of $100,00 for Phase 1 and a promise of an additional budget of $100,00 for Phase 2.

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The proposed Virtual SolutionHardware

• (2) Dell 2950 – Dual quad core processors– 32 GB RAM– No HD (Boot from SAN)– Quad NIC & 2 onboard– 2 FC HBA’s– Remote Access Cards

• Dell ESX 310 SAN– 1 Array 15 300gb w/FC drives

• (2) Brocade FC 8 port 4gb Switches

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The proposed Virtual SolutionSoftware

• (3) VM-Ware Virtual Infrastructure 3 Enterprise license.– 2 Production & 1 Dev

• 1 Virtual Center Server license

• 3 VM Ware training classes

• Using existing Backup Exec License for backups.

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Initial Phase 1 Install• SAN Install & configuration was done by

Dell as part of the original purchase agreement.

• (2) Dell 2950’s running ESX Enterprise• Virtual Center Server was installed on a

retired Dell 1850 with supporting database installed on a virtual SQL server.

• Physical backup server using Backup Exec and a dual LTO 4 tape library connected via a single path to the Fiber Fabric.

• Development ESX server using direct attached storage.

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GASUP04FCSW2 – Port 6

CX310x01_SPB2 (Primary)

54 6 70 1 2 3

1312 14 1598 1110

Brocade200E

54 6 70 1 2 3

1312 14 1598 1110

Brocade200E

PowerVault128T

BULB_2FCSW2 – Port 7

BULIB_1FCSW2 – Port 3

TL 4000 Svc Tag: FCY2RF1Management http://192.168.0.244WWN: 2000000E111184DDTape 1: ULT3580 – TD4 - Ser # 1310062289 FW: 8371Tape 2: ULT3580 – TD4 - Ser # 1310060622 FW: 8371

PowerEdge1950

0

1

2

3

GAESXPROD002_HBA2 (Secondary)FCSW2 – Port 1

GAESXProd003_HBA1(Secondary)FCSW1 – Port 5

GAESXProd002_HBA1 (Primary)FCSW1 – Port 1

GAESXPROD003_HBA2 (Primary)FCSW2 – Port 5

CX310x01_SPA2 (Primary)

CX310x01_SPA3 (Secondary))CX310x01_SPB3 (Secondary)

Dell Power Edge 2950

Dell Power Edge 2950 RAC: VMWare ESX Ver: 3.05

Dell Power Edge 1850

Initial San Configuration

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Phase 1 Success

• 6 months into Phase 1:– All client facing Web & FTP servers

virtualized – All Application Servers Virtualized– All Internal Web Servers Virtualized

• Ready to plan for Phase 2

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Phase 1 Benefits

• Increase of RTO & RPO of all client facing services

• Complete failover:– Application Servers– Supporting SQL Servers– Web & FTP servers– Mail Servers

• Reduction of heating & cooling requirements • More free rack Space

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(Phase )1Lessons Learned

• EMC is a great product at an even greater price.

• There are backup challenges to backing up a virtual system

• Need a management tool to monitor VM environment.

• There are knowledgeable vendors out there that can save you money in the long run if brought in early in the project.

• There are better ways to backup virtual environment than client based backup tools.

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(Phase 1) Lessons Learned• Highly recommend having a VMware

Capacity Planner Assessment done so you know what your systems utilization is and size hardware accordingly.

• Virtual Host Sprawl (VHS) can get out of hand– VHS can chew into your virtual resources and no

one wants to pony up money when your run out…..

– Charge Back software is a nice tool to combat the sprawl.

– My first combat to virtual host sprawl was to ask one simple question

• Where is the budget for this new project?

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3rd Party Solutions• Monitoring

• Backup

• Charge Backs

• Migration Tools

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Monitoring

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Monitoring (Cont)• Alerts & Alarms

• Management Reports

• WorkLoad Migration Modeling

• Resource Management

• Dash Board View of entire Virtual Infrastructure via a Web Interface.

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Backup Solutions• VizionCore VRanger Pro

• Backup Exec

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Migration Tools• Physical to Virtual (P2V)

• Virtual to Virtual (V2V)

• Virtual to Physical (V2P)

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VMWare Capacity Planning• A great look into what your current

physical systems are doing

• A nice way to know what the I/O and throughput of current systems are.

• Very important to know if you are trying to size an ISCSI soultion.

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Server Migration vs P2V• Example current Physical SQL DB Svr

– Windows 2000– SQL 2000

• Setup new Windows 2008 Svr– Install SQL 2008 – Migrate Databases– Test current applications – Cut to new system

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The Virtual (Phase 2) Challenge

• Migrate Heavy Hitters

• Storage Requirements

• Put an Action plan in place to build on lessons learned from phase 1.

• Move from client based tape backup to disk to disk backups and snap shot capabilities.

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The Proposed Hardware Solution Phase 2

• Addition of 2nd Storage array 10 300gb FC drives

• 3rd Dell PE 2950 ESX Server• Dell MD 1000 for Disk to Disk backups

– 6TB of direct attached storage• Two ESXi servers for Dev & User Support

– (Repurposed Servers from physical grave yard.)• Additional backup server

– (Repurposed Servers from physical grave yard.)• Physical server to host VizionCore

monitoring software– (Repurposed Servers from physical grave yard.)

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The proposed Virtual SolutionSoftware

• (1) VM-Ware Virtual Infrastructure 3 Enterprise license.

• VizionCore Essentials– VFog Light– VRanger Pro– Migration tool

• Storage Craft – ShadowProtect Server Edition

• ESXi Free version for use on Dev & User Support Servers.

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Phase 2 Install

• Addition of 3rd Array into SAN– Adding apx 2tb of usable storage.

• Dell 2950’s running ESX Enterprise

• VizionCore VFoglight was installed on a retired Dell 1850 with supporting database installed on a virtual SQL server.

• Additional backup/file server to host the direct attached MD/1000

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Phase 2 Install (Cont)

• (2) Dell 2950’s to host free ESXi with direct attached storage– Installed free ESXi and repurposed ESX

Enterprise license to new production ESX server

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GASUP04FCSW2 – Port 6

CX310x01_SPB2 (Primary)

54 6 70 1 2 3

1312 14 1598 1110

Brocade200E

54 6 70 1 2 3

1312 14 1598 1110

Brocade200E

PowerVault128T

BULB_2FCSW2 – Port 7

BULIB_1FCSW2 – Port 3

TL 4000 Svc Tag: FCY2RF1Management http://192.168.0.244WWN: 2000000E111184DDTape 1: ULT3580 – TD4 - Ser # 1310062289 FW: 8371Tape 2: ULT3580 – TD4 - Ser # 1310060622 FW: 8371

PowerEdge1950

0

1

2

3

GAESXPROD002_HBA2 (Secondary)FCSW2 – Port 1

Dell Power Edge 2950

GAESXProd003_HBA1(Secondary)FCSW1 – Port 5

GAESXProd002_HBA1 (Primary)FCSW1 – Port 1

GAESXProd004_HBA1 (Primary)FCSW1 – Port 2

GAESXPROD003_HBA2 (Primary)FCSW2 – Port 5

GAESXProd004_HBA2(Secondary)FCSW2 – Port 2

CX310x01_SPA2 (Primary)

CX310x01_SPA3 (Secondary))CX310x01_SPB3 (Secondary)

Dell Power Edge 2950

Dell Power Edge 2950 RAC: VMWare ESX Ver: 3.05

Dell Power Edge 1850

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End result of Phase 2

•A fully redundant Virtual Environment • 44 virtual host• Backup Infrastructure• Less than 30U of Rack Space.

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(Phase 2) Lessons Learned• 3rd Party snap shot backup solutions

don’t work (well) with legacy SQL or Sybase. – Newer versions of SQL with VSS is

required.

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Virtualization Phase 3Partner Stand Alone System

• Partner hosted system

• 2 SQL DB servers

• 2 Web Servers

• FTP Server

• Application Server

• About 4TB of storage including on-line backup files

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Proposed System

• 2 Dell PE R710– 24GB RAM– Dual Quad Core

• Equalogic PS6000xv– 16 15k SAS drives 450GB 7.2TB Raw

• 4.7TB Usable in RAID 50 config

– (2) VSphere 4 Enterprise – Vizion Core VFogLight 4 CPU lic

• Cost less than $95,000

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One more problem with Virtualization

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Summary• Covered a lot of ground

• Hopefully I was able to share some ideas and possibilities that you can use.

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