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Virtually Limitless: Moving to Virtual Servers
Adam DuffyEdina Public Schools
What is a virtual server?
Traditional server◦ One physical server◦ One OS◦ All installed hardware is limited to that one server◦ If hardware fails, server fails
What is a virtual server?
Virtual server◦ Contained on a virtual host◦ Virtual host provides resources to the VM as
needed◦ VM can easily be migrated to another host,
because each VM is given consistent virtual hardware
What is a virtual server?
What is a virtual server?
Why did we go with VMware vSphere? What other options are available?
◦ Microsoft Hyper-V◦ Xen (Citrix XenServer)
What products are available for virtualizing?
Use resources more efficiently Physical server consolidation Manage servers more efficiently Reduce downtime, both planned and
unplanned Lots of tools
What advantages does virtualization provide?
Capture the state of a server at a point in time
You can safely make changes, knowing that you can revert back if something goes wrong
Integration with backups◦ Snapshots themselves are not backups!
Snapshots
Make an exact copy of a server without disturbing the live copy
“Let’s try this” Production -> development
Live clone
Have a pre-configured version of an OS ready to deploy
Ease of deployment opens up new possibilities
Templates
Move VMs between hosts with no downtime VMs are automatically restarted when a
host fails Automatically balance computing capacity
across hosts
vMotion, HA, and DRS
Easily add CPU, RAM, HD space, NIC Minimize downtime
Adding and removing resources
Many vendors provide premade VMs for deploying their services
Cisco NCS SAN failover manager
Vendor-provided VMs
Manage failover from production datacenters to disaster recovery sites
Site Recovery Manager
Hardware◦ Hosts
3x HP ProLiant DL380 G6 8x CPU cores per host, at 2.266 GHz each 24 GB RAM per host
◦ Storage 2x HP StorageWorks P4300 G2 (LeftHand SAN) 5.5 TB usable
Software◦ VMware vSphere 4
How we got started
Makes switching to virtual servers much easier
Can do it (mostly) live Some success and some failure
Converting physical to virtual
Before
(dramatic reenactment)
After
10 CPUs, 22 cores Using 13.2 GHz / 97.5 GHz
288 GB RAM Using 151 GB
34 TB usable storage Using 24 TB 10 TB is high performance
44 virtual servers
You’ll need outside help Added complexity When not to virtualize
Possible downsides
Supports larger VMs◦ Up to 1 TB RAM and 32 virtual CPUs
Improvements to HA◦ Easier to set up, more scalable
vSphere Web Client
New features in vSphere 5.0/5.1
