physical to virtual: leveraging vmware's new vsphere at the

Physical to Virtual:Leveraging VMware’s new vSphere at the Faculty of

Medicine

Jean-Ray ArseneauSupervisor Analyst – Information Technology

Faculty of Medicine

Alternative titles (from colleagues)...

• Physical to Virtual: He’s only been here a few months and we already don’t recognize the infrastructure

• Physical to Virtual: How to turn an existing quarter of a million dollar infrastructure into a doorstop

• Physical to Virtual: You want to do what now?

Leveraging VMware’s new vSphere at the Faculty of Medicine

Original Project Goals

• The original project goal was to have a backup infrastructure for our corporate servers in case of failure;

• Servers were 5+ years old, hardware was beginning to fail;• Originally wanted to P2V (Physical To Virtual) servers on a

nightly basis in order to restore them in a virtual infrastructure in case of hardware failure (emergency scenario only);

• Needed a quick way to restore the entire server state in the case of hardware/software malfunction or disaster

• Wanted to implement our own “in-house” server backup solution either to Tape or Disk solution.


Like any Systems Analyst....

• I wasn’t satisfied...• The project needed more “oomph”;• This was the perfect time to migrate our corporate servers to a

virtual infrastructure;• VMware’s technology is proven and used in such enterprise

environments as:– CITIGroup (US banking enterprise)– City of Ottawa– Government of Canada

• Perfect opportunity to consolidate our servers, lower our power/cooling footprint, make space in our datacenter, facilitate management of our servers and best of all – lower costs.

• Given everything listed above, backing up server states will be seamless and integrate well into the environment without creating too many headaches.


Pre-Virtualization: Servers


Physical

Corporate Servers

20

Physical Servers 20 (spread across 2 BladeCenters)

CPU Capacity 240Ghz

Memory Capacity 80GB

Max CPU Consumption

10Ghz

Max Memory Consumption

48GB

Pre-Virtualization: SAN


Physical

Storage subsystems

3

Total available SAN storage

11TB

Provisioned storage

8.8TB

Used storage 3.8TB

Room for expansion

2TB

Planning our new infrastructure

• How many ESXi hosts (VMware’s server OS) do we need vs. should we have?– S.R. Hadden Quote:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-1n1BliRQ8– How much CPU/RAM should each of these servers have?– Do we plan for future expansion?

• How do we restructure our SAN? Do we restructure our SAN?– Do we stick with RDM (Raw LUNs) or move solely to

VMDK? How about a combination of both?• What kind of networking do we want? How many “pipes” are

going to be fed into each ESX hosts? Do we have enough bandwidth?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-1n1BliRQ8

Planning our new infrastructure (con’t)

• What type of VMware licenses do we require? What features do we want in our infrastructure?

• What will we be migrating over to the virtual datacenter? Do we move researchers as well?

If you use SPF1, expect to get burned. No Single Point of Failure


“Virtual” Datacenter Advantages

• Central point of management for deploying and managing corporate servers

• Deploy Windows or Linux servers from templates in 20-30 minutes instead of hours

• Quickly setup environments for various testing scenarios (great for technicians)

• “Snapshot” servers to easily recover the state of a server prior to doing any major software upgrades

• Provide high availability and dynamic resource scheduling on your servers (more later...)

• Easily add more resources to those servers requiring more (in the case of Windows 2008+, hot-add memory and virtual CPUs)


“Virtual” Datacenter Advantages (con’t)

• Managing SAN storage becomes easier (if using VMDK instead of RDM)

• Prioritize which servers get more“shares”/”slices” of the pie in case of the ESX server gets bogged down*

• Perform maintenance/upgrades/configuration changes on physical ESX hosts while providing zero downtime to your clients

• Redundant systems in addition to High Availability and Dynamic Resource Scheduling provide increased availability to your clients

• Virtual hardware doesn’t fail


VMware vSphere Features(that make our lives easier...)

• High Availability (HA)– Provides the guest/server OS with a “heartbeat”. If the

heartbeat is lost, the VM automatically gets restarted (and on a different host if the server OS experiences a failure). This happens within 30 seconds of the failure.

• Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS)– Allows a system administrator schedule resource policies to

balance the load on a cluster of ESX servers.– Can “powerdown” (sleep) unused ESX servers during non-

peak periods and automatically “powerup” these servers during a spike in usage.

– Allows you to set affinity rules for VMs that must be separate or together (ie: MSCS/SPF... DFS example)


VMware vSphere Features (con’t)

• Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS) (con’t...)– Allows to set power-on policies and power-on order when

restarting VMs due to cluster failures.– Automatically shuffle VMs (using vMotion) across the cluster

to compensate for required resources.• vMotion and Storage vMotion

– vMotion: “Live”/”Hot” migrate a VM off one ESX host and onto another ESX host without disrupting the server/application being migrated

– Storage vMotion: “Live”/”Hot” migrate a VM’s disk file (.vmdk) from one storage LUN to another storage LUN*


VMware vSphere Features (con’t)

• Alert Management– vSphere can monitor various virtual and physical aspects of

the virtual datacenter and notify the appropriate personnel via e-mail/SNMP:

• VM CPU/Memory usage• Host CPU/Memory usage• SAN usage / connectivity• Migration / DRS issues, automatic migration events• Physical Components: memory, cpu, battery, power

supply, fans, hard disks


Physical vs. Virtual Comparison: Servers


Physical Virtual Notes

Corporate Servers

20 20

Physical Servers 20 (spread across 2 BladeCenters)

2

CPU Capacity 240Ghz 44.8Ghz

Memory Capacity 80GB 128GB

CPU Consumption

<10Ghz ~5-8Ghz Spread across 32VMs

Memory Consumption

<48GB ~43-48GB Spread across 32VMs

Physical vs. Virtual Comparison: SAN


Physical Virtual Notes

Storage subsystems

3 3

Total available SAN storage

11TB 11TB Growing to 16TB “soon”

Provisioned storage

8.8TB 8.8TB

Used storage 3.8TB 3.8TB

Room for expansion

2TB 7.2TB* Space is utilized on the SAN on an “as-needed” basis using thin-provisioned disks

The Infrastructure At Work...


• Sept 14, 2009 – AM– Experienced an ESXi host failure – lost one major file server,

primary web server* and about 8 other servers– All servers were rebooted and back online within 2 minutes,

minimizing client interruptions• Almost Weekly:

– E-mails from the system indicating disk usage, resource usage, errors, etc.

• Deploy vApp – Specifically vCMA (mixed with other apps)– For true admins who are always on the go.– http://screencast.com/t/OfHCsgNx

• vMotion Demo (time permitting...)

http://screencast.com/t/OfHCsgNx

Current Project Status

• Virtual “datacenter” fully implemented• SAN is 75% re-carved for the new infrastructure, recovering

terabytes of unused space• Backup solutions are currently being tested – not all software

support vSphere or ESXi 4.0 yet, testing still to come.– Moving from Raw LUNs to VMDKs permits us to easily

backup and restore a server state very quickly or send it offsite to a DR-site (future project?).

– VMware currently offers backup solution – still buggy, but included in vSphere as “VMware Data Recovery” vApp – allows for backup to LUN, CIFS (onsite/offsite). Promising, will have to continue to evaluate.


Questions...?


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