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)

After10 CPUs, 22 cores

Using 13.2 GHz / 97.5 GHz288 GB RAM

Using 151 GB34 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

adaduffy@edina.k12.mn.us 952-848-4993

Questions?