Highly Available Tessitura

Mal Everett Technical Director

Chris Tew Business Development

Manager

Highly Available Tessitura AGENDA

Tessitura – key items we need to protect

Traditional methods for High Availability

Now lets look at Virtualization

Performance

Recovery Point and Recovery Time Objectives – Explained !

Snapshots – SAN and VMware

Examples

Questions

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Highly Available Tessitura

The Tessitura system is made up of many elements:

Microsoft SQL database (of course SQL 2008 by May 1st)

Web Front End server

Web API

SEATS Server

Payment Gateway

Reporting Batch Processor

And other add-in’s like T-Stats and so on.

Key Items we need to protect

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Highly Available Tessitura

Traditionally, using Physical Servers hardware:

WebAPI Server, SEATS Server, Report Batch Processor

These are mainly processes or Windows Services:

Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS)

Protect with two specialized servers and shared storage

Databases

Protect with Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS)

- or –

MS SQL Transaction logging / Mirroring (requires redundant hardware)

Web Front End server

Multiple (Linux or Microsoft) servers and load balancing appliances

Redundant hardware

Payment Gateway

Traditional methods for High Availability

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Highly Available Tessitura

Key “Typically physical servers achieve low usage, particularly of CPU (around 10-15% per physical server)”

Vmware’s vSphere virtualization technology makes it possible:

To package a complete x86 server running Windows or Linux as a “portable” Virtual Machine

Multiple virtual machines run simultaneously and independently on a single x86/AMD server host

To have centralized management

To treat all the resources together as a common pool

Achieve High Available solutions not previously possible

To get the full value you need Shared disc Storage as provided by a SAN (Storage Area Network)

SANS are typically manufactured by HP, IBM, EMC, Netapp and a few others.

They do require careful implementation and management to ensure they are setup and running correctly.

The bonus is that the Virtualization software, here lets zoom in on VMware’s Vsphere , gives you extras like

Distributed Resource Scheduling

High Availability

Fault Tolerance (more on these latter)

Lets look at Virtualization

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Highly Available Tessitura VMware

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Highly Available Tessitura

DRS

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Highly Available Tessitura

HA

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Highly Available Tessitura RPO and RTO - Explained

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Highly Available Tessitura

In a lot of cases (in the past) the standard recovery is based upon the previous evenings Backup Tapes

Given time windows and data volumes, the previous evenings backup may be not be “full”

These give a RPO maybe a sliding point that may be anything up to 24 hrs

(ie the previous nights backup)

To use the backup may involve repairing hardware, and restoring from tape. Usually it takes as long, if not longer, to restore from tape, than the time it took to write them.

These give a RTO maybe anything up 24 Hrs, once hardware is available to begin the recovery process on (the hardware usually has to be a close fit to the original)

So after an event or failure until the point in time when things are up and working again, the time for the recovery will be approximately a day after, and the restored environment, maybe two days behind. There will be a window of a day where NO processing has taking place.

With Virtualization we can do much better than this !

RPO and RTO (2)

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Highly Available Tessitura

Event Minutes Downtime Intervention

VMware in your Computer room

Resourcing Issue 1~2 0 Automatic

Physical Server Host (HA) 2~3 2~3 Automatic

Physical Server Host (FT) milliseconds 0 Automatic

Application Monitoring, SLA + snapshots

Application Failure 60 mins RPO 60 mins RTO Manual

Reboot server/contact vendor/restore to snapshot if necessary

Monitoring, SLA, DR and recovery site

Site or SAN Failure 2 Hrs RPO 2 Hrs RTO Manual

Failover to offsite

Typical RPO and RTOs with Virtualization

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Highly Available Tessitura

SANs vs VMware Snapshotting

Most SANs can do LUN

(logical disc volume)

Snapshots and SAN<> SAN Replication.

Some can do “application” aware

Snapshots.

Some add-on programs can take

Advantage of VMware’s features to

Provide the same features as the SAN in

a Storage agnostic manner.

Advantages:

Recovery

Image AND File Level, Quick start from Image, Isolation & Sandboxing

Test Environments

Backup and Storage Features

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Highly Available Tessitura

An example SAN<>SAN

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Highly Available Tessitura An Example using VMware aware Snapshots

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Highly Available Tessitura

VMware

vSphere Enterprise Plus (DRS, HA, FT and Storage Vmotion)

HP SANS

P2000 series iSCSI/FC small system SANs

P4000 series iSCSI

EVA - Enterprise Virtual Array (fiber channel, high performance / capacity)

AAPT

Mid Band ethernet (10Mbs .. 40 Mbs over copper / fiber )

Fibre ethernet (100 Mbs)

Elmtree

Managed Services, Application Monitoring and Datacenter Hosting

Some of the products mentioned

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Highly Available Tessitura QUESTIONS