Scaling Virtual Infrastructure:Planning for Growth, High Availability, and Rapid Provisioning

Mike DiPetrillo

Specialist Systems Engineer

Customers Grow

Plan for Long Term Growth

Short term goals are what get you into troublePlan for growth on storage, networking, memory, and physical hostsBreak stuff into logical units but don’t get too granularThink about an adaptive environmentLet’s look at the technology that plays a role in a scalable environment…

TECHNOLOGYThe building blocks for your infrastructure

Sizing a Virtual Machine

Disks can grow but they can’t shrink*Memory can always be adjusted

VMs don’t use most of the memory you give themOnly use SMP when you have an app that supports it

Watch out for false performance ceilings

Hardware Selection – The Building Block for ESX ServerStart by beefing up what you have

More memoryMore NICs

New Servers64-bit extensionsMemoryExpansion SlotsDual/Quad CoreProcessor Speed/Cache

Storage – Where Do I Put These Things?

Shared storage will scale with you – invest now

Storage – How Big Can I Go?

One Big Volume or Individual?Will you be doing replication?• More granular slices will helpHigh performance applications?• Individual volumes could helpWatch for trade offs on next slide

With Virtual Infrastructure 3VMDK, swap, config files, log files, and snapshots all live on VMFS

Storage – Type of Access

VMFSLeverage templates and quick provisioningFewer LUNs means you don’t have to watch HeapScales better with Consolidated BackupPreferred Method

RAWRAW may give better performanceRAW means more LUNs

More provisioning timeSee next slide for Heap issuesAdvanced features still work

Best to mix – use RAW sparingly

Networking – You Have to Get There

Plan ahead for network growthInvestigate VLAN tagging early on

Push to get adoptedLarger form factor servers may be needed

Virtual Infrastructure Server –Management of Your Infrastructure

Bandwidth80 – 100 kb/s per host when collecting data

Template DeploymentPlace template store strategically

Provide redundancyCluster Virtual Infrastructure ServerLicense Server can go down but not for long

Virtual Infrastructure Server –Management of Your Infrastructure

Scale your databaseDo some cleanupUse an ODBC compliant external database

Organization is keyRemember that you cannot VMotion between DatacentersUse Resource Pools to break up your business units – not DatacentersStick with around 16 hosts in a cluster

PROCESSThe glue that holds it all together

Deploying Virtual Machines

Option 1: Build by handTime consumingNeed media everywhere or central ISO storeInconsistent results

Deploying Virtual Machines - Templates

Option 2: Leverage TemplatesConsistent resultsMuch faster

Still has challengesWhere do you put your template store?• NAS and iSCSI are lower cost• Fibre Channel uses block copy• What about remote sites or multiple sites?

Administrator Still involved

Deploying Virtual Machines – Self Provisioning

http://www.run-virtual.com/?page_id=55

Backing Up Your Infrastructure

Low/Good

High/Bad

Cos

t

“Nines”

Annual Downtime

99%

4 Days

99.9%

9 Hours

99.99%

52 Minutes

“Five Nines”

5 Minutes

Entry-Level

Server

H/AServer

Failover

Cluster

Fault-Tolerant

Hardware

X

10X

100X

1000XMirro

red

SitesMost applications need only a moderate level of availability

Virtualization increases availability with standard hardware and it lowers cost of higher levels of availability

Unplanned Downtime Protection is Expensive

VMware HA 3rd Party Solutions

Extra Disk SpaceOlder data in VMsSnapshot concerns

Things will go bad – plan for it

Resource Pool

XNo Extra Disk SpaceCurrent Data

Providing High Availability is Not Expensive

PEOPLEYou have to know how to use the stuff!

Building a Virtual Infrastructure Team

Get administrators with knowledge in key areasHardwareStorageOperating SystemsNetworkingBC/DR/HABackups

Define the Team

Core group runs the infrastructureDeep VMware knowledge for root cause analysis

Others add value with knowledgeWeekly team meetings1 Administrator per 10 ESX hosts or 100-200 Virtual Machines

Get the Knowledge

VMware Certified Traininghttp://mylearn1.vmware.com/mgrreg/index.cfm

VMware Certified Professionals add valuehttp://mylearn1.vmware.com/portals/certification/

Ask for Help When You Need It

Don’t be afraid to ask for helpThere are hundreds of VMware Certified partners that can help you

Value Added ResellersVMware Certified Consulting PartnersOEMsVMware Professional Services

The 3 Pillars

When scaling our your infrastructure think about the 3 pillars

People

Process

Technology

3 Strong Pillars will stand the test of time

Your Action Plan

Select the right technology for the jobPlan for growth – even if you don’t think you will

Get your processes documentedUnlock the true power of virtualization

Pick you’re “A” TeamYou need to build knowledge

Build your environment from these pillars

Questions?

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Some or all of the features in this document may be representative of feature areas under development. Feature commitments must not be included in contracts, purchase orders, or sales agreements of any kind. Technical feasibility and market demand will affect final delivery.