June 1, 2006 at 12:18 pm
Interesting discussion, all.
Having just been part of the successful migration of a corporate data center from one side of the country to another, where we literally "flipped" the Physical to Virtual server ratio from 80 physical/20 virtual to 15 physical/80 virtual, VMWare ESX with a SAN was a slam dunk for us. And the suits are thrilled about being able to host onsite in just a few racks as opposed to the pain of the former "pay by the inch" host
At my day job we are currently in the process of finalizing a 5-year infrastructure plan where we will do something similar, but on a smaller scale. We may do blades and we may do or full DL380s, but IMHO the key is in centralizing the data storage, then having the flexibility to distribute the virtual resource load across many servers as needed for hardware maintenance. Some apps act funny on one server and then behave well when miograted onto another, so there can be a delicate balance between running apps that creates some interesting puzzles.
It wasn't perfect. There was a SQL Server 2000 DataMart instance that that never performed well on the VMWare platform, so we ended up moving it back to its own dedicated physical server. Small price to pay. In reality, there will always be a need for some apps to remain physical, for various reasons, so that a Hybrid center with both virtual and physically hosted apps is very realistic.
I am finding that the overhead of learning how to incorporate virtualization into a comprehensive Disaster/Recovery plan is time-expensive, but in the end I will sleep more easily at night, and that means alot.
Thanks for the thread, Steve!
Stuart
"Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast. In the pool where you least expect it, will be a fish" - Ovid
June 1, 2006 at 2:22 pm
Thanks for the note!!! I'm assuming ESX works great? All servers restarted easily if the host reboots for a patch?
I'd love to see some notes and an article on this if you get a chance!
June 1, 2006 at 2:59 pm
ESX is their highest end server. It's a very thin OS, and as such, not really prone to much patching.
June 1, 2006 at 3:51 pm
As you say, the ESX host runs on a super-thin Linux Kernel. The only reason to patch is to add functionality to the product (for support of a specific virtual device upgrade or some such thing).
I found than the SANS website had flagged the Browser based Management Console in the 2.5 ESX version 1 year ago, so that's one exception. Other than that, the attack surface of that kernel is miniscule, though we all thought Mac OS X was immune to hacking, too.
One amazing thing is we first virtualized the existing physical servers using the VMWare P2V (Physical to Virtual) product. This encapsulates the entire OS (Win2k, Win2k3, and Linux/Unix OS if you need it) + plus its storage into a single file.
I was initially VERY skeptical about I/O and processor performance. But our network engineer was amazingly skilled, and it became obvious after the initial development environments had been virtualized that this thing was really going to fly. So we started virtualizing the lightweight production app servers and gained more confidence in it. I could be wrong because I was not in those trenches, but I did not hear of a single instance where a virtualized server did not just start right up and start running as if it never left.
I don't want to sound like a walking ad for these guys, but my experience has been powerfully positive, and the new ESX 3.x version is coming out this month. Together with a 3rd party product called esxRanger, this technology is almost a no-brainer for High Availablity options, though I'm looking uphill at a pretty steep learning curve regarding the entire toolset.
I still am not yet considering the virtualization of any high-performance SQL Server environment (give me a year), but for the lightweight to midrange Utility instances I have no hesitation about it.
I will look through my IE Bookmarks to see if there's anything I referenced other than the VMWare website that educated me along the way.
Stuart
"Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast. In the pool where you least expect it, will be a fish" - Ovid
June 1, 2006 at 5:04 pm
Hi All,
We are just starting to look at VMWare and waiting for version 3.x. One concern we have is the support from Microsoft on their products running in a Virtual environment. This link was sent to us by our Microsoft Technical Account Manger, and as expected he is aggressively discouraging us from taking the virtualisation path.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/897615
I know if the VMWare is bought with the hardware, the hardware vendor (HP, Dell etc) will assist with fault resolution.
I would be interested to see if any one has had trouble getting support from Microsoft in a Virtual environment?
Cheers
June 1, 2006 at 6:40 pm
You might try running that up the flagpole at the VMWare Discussion Forum and see what happens. I haven't had an issue that wasn't resolved by moving a virtual server to a new host so I have no direct experience with begging MS or working with the hardware vendor.
http://www.vmware.com/community/forum.jspa?forumID=21
One thing I want to reiterate is that my experience with server consolidation with VMWare was to take a bunch of lightweight servers, virtualize and hang them on a new Virtual Host. As many as 15 to a single host. It was particularly great for migrating legacy apps and ditching old hardware.
I don't know yet whether the new ESX 3.0 will make improvements on processor request handling and saturating a SAN with REDO Logs and such, but until it's shown it's better I would suggest NOT putting any heavywight apps on there...yet.
Stuart
"Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast. In the pool where you least expect it, will be a fish" - Ovid
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