Introduction to Server Virtualisation Planning and Implementing a Virt

Introduction to Server Virtualisation and Planning and Implementing a Virtualisation Project:

Introduction to Server Virtualisation and Planning and Implementing a Virtualisation Project Alan McSweeney

Agenda:

January 9, 2011 2 Agenda Solution Requirements Virtualisation Benefits and Applications Why Implement Virtualisation Server Virtualisation Implementation Process Capacity Planning Financial and Cost Benefit Analysis Architecture Design Monitoring and Reporting Project Planning and Implementation

General IT Solution Characteristics:

January 9, 2011 3 General IT Solution Characteristics Resilience Infrastructure tolerant of failure to reduce the need to invoke disaster recovery Reliable underlying hardware and software components Scalable Infrastructure that can grow to meet future requirements without significant engineering Platform for long-term growth Disaster Recovery Solution that provides disaster recovery and business continuity Manageable Solution that is easily manageable, supportable Secure Return on Investment Delivers a real business benefit

Server Questions to Ask:

January 9, 2011 4 Server Questions to Ask

Virtualisation Benefits:

January 9, 2011 5 Virtualisation Benefits Consolidate Existing Servers – your existing servers can be consolidated into a reduced number. This recovers floor space and reduces server operating costs and environmental requirements Contain Server Growth – server growth is contained as servers are reused and made available to new applications Ease of Implementation – Server Virtualisation can be implemented without any application changes unlike application partitioning which requires substantial effort Adaptive Flexible Computer Resources – demand for additional computing resources can be addressed easily and quickly. Additional resources can be distributed across all applications

Virtualisation Benefits:

January 9, 2011 6 Virtualisation Benefits Performance Improvement – constrained servers can be allocated more resources Ease of Management and Administration – the management of virtual servers is made easier and simpler Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery – a simplified server infrastructure and the server virtualisation layer makes recovery to a backup facility quicker and easier Capacity Management – improved capacity planning through central performance management, ability to manage service levels and user response times

Virtualisation Benefits:

January 9, 2011 7 Virtualisation Benefits Tangible benefit - reduced costs Hardware and software costs can be reduced by 50% to 80% Operations costs can be reduced by 40% to 90%

Virtualisation Applications :

January 9, 2011 8 Virtualisation Applications Server Growth – contains growth Server Containment – reuse existing servers to deliver more by freeing unused resources Server Replacement – replace existing servers with new, specially designed virtual server infrastructure New Servers – new virtual servers can be created quickly for applications Performance – additional resources can be added to virtual servers to meet scheduled or unscheduled demands

Virtualisation Applications:

January 9, 2011 9 Virtualisation Applications Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity – virtualised infrastructure is very easy to recover Application Development Projects – new virtual servers can be created quickly for application development and testing System and Application Migration Projects – new virtual servers can be created quickly for migrating systems and applications: ActiveDirectory Exchange upgrades SQL upgrades

Data Centre Costs – Administration and Power:

January 9, 2011 10 Data Centre Costs – Administration and Power

Power and Floor Space Issues Dominate:

January 9, 2011 11 Power and Floor Space Issues Dominate Data Centre Issue Ranking

Data Centre Power and Heat – 25% Annual Growth:

January 9, 2011 12 Data Centre Power and Heat – 25% Annual Growth Server blades have had an impact on data centre economics Freed budget through cost reduction should focus on power and cooling

Reasons for Virtualisation:

January 9, 2011 13 Reasons for Virtualisation

Projects Associated With Virtualisation :

January 9, 2011 14 Projects Associated With Virtualisation

Managing the Virtualised Environment - ITIL:

January 9, 2011 15 Managing the Virtualised Environment - ITIL Configuration Management VM configuration CMDB feeder Charge-back Change Management Audit management and tracking VM access control Provisioning management Disaster recovery Incident and Problem Management Service desk integration Root cause analysis Problem identification Performance management Release Management Application mapping/discovery Code development Operations/development process integrations Scalability testing

Lessons Learned:

January 9, 2011 16 Lessons Learned Server blades remain a key platform for future enterprise computing strategies TCO is necessitating a push towards IT simplification that drives the server market today and in particular server blades Power and cooling issues remain front of mind for IT and data centre managers today and for the near future Awareness of internal political struggles critical: Disparate groups do not share data and probably won't care to start doing so Requires sensitivity to change management challenges Work in phases - start with small pilot, gradual rollout Hidden costs exist as there is no way of knowing what will really be uncovered as work begins Undocumented processes are a huge and costly challenge

Server Virtualisation Implementation Process:

January 9, 2011 17 Server Virtualisation Implementation Process Analysis and Design Implement Virtualisation Platform Physical To Virtual Migration Virtual Server Backup And Replication Reporting and Performance Monitoring Policy-Based Virtual Service Life Cycle Management Stage 1 Stage 2 Stage 3 Stage 4 Stage 5 Stage 6

Stage 1 - Analysis and Design:

January 9, 2011 18 Stage 1 - Analysis and Design Four steps Inventory Workload Data Collection Analyse Design and Specify Inventory Analyse Record Design and Specify

Approach to Capacity Planning:

January 9, 2011 19 Approach to Capacity Planning Two product options available: VMware Capacity Planner Hosted and chargeable service from VMware partner Data collected from servers via WMI API PlateSpin PowerRecon Product from PlateSpin that provides a local data collection and reporting client PowerRecon is very functional tool but it has higher cost that VMware Capacity Planner

Capacity Planning Outputs:

January 9, 2011 20 Capacity Planning Outputs Server inventory including hardware specification Virtualisation exclusions Specialist hardware (such as FAX servers) High paging rates High I/O High CPU utilisation MSCS clusters (not specifically excluded but problematic) Multiprocessor imbalances Server anomalies and alerts Identify and resolve problems in advance of starting virtualisation to reduce risk and increase success Consolidation scenarios Multiple platforms

Sample Server Issues:

January 9, 2011 21 Sample Server Issues Sample analysis output with some potential issues

Server CPU Utilisation:

January 9, 2011 22 Server CPU Utilisation Extract from an analysis of 117 servers

Multiprocessor Server Utilisation:

January 9, 2011 23 Multiprocessor Server Utilisation

Potential Server Performance Anomalies and Alerts:

January 9, 2011 24 Potential Server Performance Anomalies and Alerts Potential anomalies in yellow and alerts in red

Consolidation Scenarios:

January 9, 2011 25 Consolidation Scenarios Identify target server type Identify the number of servers required to support the virtualisation workload Number of processors Number of cores Typical target servers Dual processor, dual core Dual processor, quad core Quad processor, dual core

Consolidation Scenario:

January 9, 2011 26 Consolidation Scenario Results of consolidation scenario Consolidate 117 servers on to six servers

Virtualisation Resource Allocation and Configuration Analysis:

January 9, 2011 27 Virtualisation Resource Allocation and Configuration Analysis How much resources to leave free to cater for server failure? VM1 VM2 VM3 VM4 Limit Threshold Reservation Threshold Actual Usage VM5 VM6 VM7 VM8 Server 1 Server 2 HA Cluster

Virtualisation Resource Allocation and Configuration Analysis:

January 9, 2011 28 Virtualisation Resource Allocation and Configuration Analysis Critical (or all virtual servers) will be restarted on other physical server(s) VM1 VM2 VM3 VM4 VM5 VM6 VM7 VM8 Server 1 Server 2 VM1 VM2 VM3 VM4 X HA Cluster

Stage 2 - Implement Virtualisation Platform:

January 9, 2011 29 Stage 2 - Implement Virtualisation Platform VMware ESX Server - Platform for virtualising servers VMware VMFS - High-performance cluster file system for storage virtualisation VMware Virtual SMP - Multi-processor support for virtual machines VMware VirtualCentre - Centralised management, automation and optimisation for IT infrastructure VMware HA - Cost effective high availability for virtual machines VMware DRS - Dynamic balancing and allocation of resources for virtual machines VMware VMotion - Live migration of virtual machines without service interruption

VMware Platforms and Options:

January 9, 2011 30 VMware Platforms and Options VMware Infrastructure 3 Starter NAS or local storage No HA, DRS, VCB Restrictions 4 processors 8 GB RAM VMware Infrastructure 3 Standard HA, DRS, VCB available as separate options VMware Infrastructure 3 Enterprise Includes virtual SMP, VMFS, VMotion, HA, DRS, Consolidated Backup VirtualCentre

VMware Sample Costs:

January 9, 2011 31 VMware Sample Costs

Sample Configurations:

January 9, 2011 32 Sample Configurations Two ESX Servers, VirtualCentre, Backup to Disk, Tape Backup Two ESX Servers, VirtualCentre, Backup to Disk, Tape Backup, Virtualised DR Facility with Replication Very Large Scale Implementation

Two ESX Servers, VirtualCentre, Backup to Disk, Tape Backup:

January 9, 2011 33 Two ESX Servers, VirtualCentre, Backup to Disk, Tape Backup Two servers running ESX Server – provides resilience in the event of server failure SAN to store data VirtualCentre to administer and manage virtual infrastructure Backup to disk using low cost disk Tape backup unit

Two ESX Servers, VirtualCentre, Backup to Disk, Tape Backup:

January 9, 2011 34 Two ESX Servers, VirtualCentre, Backup to Disk, Tape Backup Primary SAN data copied to inexpensive disk – fast backup Disk backup copied to tape/autoloader

Two ESX Servers, VirtualCentre, Backup to Disk, Tape Backup, Virtualised DR Facility with Replication:

January 9, 2011 35 Two ESX Servers, VirtualCentre, Backup to Disk, Tape Backup, Virtualised DR Facility with Replication Two servers running ESX Server – provides resilience in the event of server failure SAN to store data VirtualCentre to administer and manage virtual infrastructure Backup to disk using low cost disk Tape backup unit Link for data replication Backup virtual infrastructure for recovery

Two ESX Servers, VirtualCentre, Backup to Disk, Tape Backup, Virtualised DR Facility with Replication:

January 9, 2011 36 Two ESX Servers, VirtualCentre, Backup to Disk, Tape Backup, Virtualised DR Facility with Replication Primary SAN data copied to inexpensive disk – fast backup Disk backup copied to tape/autoloader Disk to disk copy to DR location Move tapes to backup location

Two ESX Servers, VirtualCentre, Backup to Disk, Tape Backup, Virtualised DR Facility with Replication:

January 9, 2011 37 Two ESX Servers, VirtualCentre, Backup to Disk, Tape Backup, Virtualised DR Facility with Replication

Very Large Scale Implementation:

January 9, 2011 38 Very Large Scale Implementation

Very Large Scale Implementation:

January 9, 2011 39 Very Large Scale Implementation

Cost Benefit Analysis:

January 9, 2011 40 Cost Benefit Analysis Tangible savings Server purchases Operational costs Administration costs Power, HVAC Deferred cost Intangible savings Faster server provisioning Better utilisation Reduced floorspace Improved business continuity and disaster recovery

Server Operation Assumptions:

January 9, 2011 41 Server Operation Assumptions

Sample Project Costs and Savings 1:

January 9, 2011 42 Sample Project Costs and Savings 1 16 servers to be virtualised Avoid 4 new servers a year

Sample Project Costs and Savings 2:

January 9, 2011 43 Sample Project Costs and Savings 2 32 servers to be virtualised Avoid 6 new servers a year

Sample Project Costs and Savings 2:

January 9, 2011 44 Sample Project Costs and Savings 2 64 servers to be virtualised Avoid 8 new servers a year

Stage 3 - Physical to Virtual Migration:

January 9, 2011 45 Stage 3 - Physical to Virtual Migration Two principal Physical to Virtual Server conversion tools available PlateSpin PowerConvert – this is a very functional tool but it has a cost VMware Converter Enterprise – this is a new product from VMware. It is available at no additional cost to existing and new VirtualCentre Management Server customers who have valid support and subscription contracts The selected servers are migrated to the previously installed and configured server virtualisation platform Windows, Netware, Linux Sun, etc. servers can be migrated Migrations will be performed and tested incrementally

Testing:

January 9, 2011 46 Testing Testing will consist of: User Acceptance Testing – to ensure that the application functionality is unaffected Operations Acceptance Testing – to ensure that the virtual platform can be operated and supported

Operations Acceptance Testing :

January 9, 2011 47 Operations Acceptance Testing Stability / Robustness - Verification of continuous operation over extended period Resilience - Ensure the system will operate continuously through failure or controlled shutdown of individual components Ensure the system will have sufficient levels of redundancy to ensure committed availability targets are maintained Systems Monitoring - Ensure that error reporting / reactive alerting allows effective trouble shooting and problem diagnosis Performance Management / Service Level Reporting - Ensure that performance monitoring data allows detection of performance issues, and measurement against agreed service levels Systems Operations - Ensure that support and maintenance processes and procedures are operable Security Manageability - Ensure that the systems can be managed and administered and that correct procedures and training are in place Backup and Recovery - Ensure that reliable automated backup solution in place including failure notification Performance - Ensure that the observed performance matches what is expected and committed to

Operations Acceptance Testing – ITIL Checklist:

January 9, 2011 48 Operations Acceptance Testing – ITIL Checklist

Stage 4 - Backup and Recovery:

January 9, 2011 49 Stage 4 - Backup and Recovery Hot backups, restores and disaster recovery of the virtual servers can be performed over the LAN or WAN Consolidated backup No agents on virtual servers Server replication Virtual machine replication using third-party products such as VizionCore Virtual server replication using third-party products such as DoubleTake, WANSync, Replistor Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Two options (not mutually exclusive) Existing (virtual) server backup NetBackup Tivoli Storage Manager Data Protector CommVault Virtual server consolidated backup Third-party tool - esxRanger

Option 1 – Existing Backup Tool:

January 9, 2011 50 Option 1 – Existing Backup Tool Each virtual server is just another Windows server instance and it can be backed-up using existing backup and recovery tools

Option 2 – Consolidated Backup:

January 9, 2011 51 Option 2 – Consolidated Backup Protection of virtual is based on three separate technologies that are integrated VMware Consolidated Backup esxRanger Professional with VCB Plugin Backup software

Stage 5 - Reporting and Monitoring:

January 9, 2011 52 Stage 5 - Reporting and Monitoring Reporting options VirtualCentre VirtualCentre SQL database reporting Third-party tool – VizionCore esxCharter, PlateSpin PowerRecon Monitoring Virtual servers Underlying physical hardware

VMware VirtualCentre:

January 9, 2011 53 VMware VirtualCentre

VMware VirtualCentre:

January 9, 2011 54 VMware VirtualCentre Performance Charts CPU Usage Memory Usage Disk I/O Usage Network I/O Usage System Usage System Mapping Global Maps Inventory Maps VMotion Resource Maps

esxCharter:

January 9, 2011 55 esxCharter esxCharter is a real-time management and reporting tool that provides key information for managing VMware ESX Server systems esxCharter rolls up key performance metrics to a root level spreadsheet type view

esxCharter:

January 9, 2011 56 esxCharter

Monitoring:

January 9, 2011 57 Monitoring Monitoring will arise in two areas Monitoring virtual servers (and their applications) Monitoring underlying hardware Tools such as HP Systems Insight Manager and Dell OpenManage run in the virtual server Cannot provide hardware alerts in a virtual environment Can use monitoring tools such as Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manger (SCOM) or HP OpenView Monitor entire environment

SCOM VMware Management Pack Integration:

January 9, 2011 58 SCOM VMware Management Pack Integration

SCOM for Virtual Infrastructure Monitoring:

January 9, 2011 59 SCOM for Virtual Infrastructure Monitoring VMware integration via SCOM Management Pack eXc VMWare Management Pack Quest Management eXtensions for SCOM nWorks VMWare Events MP for SCOM nWorks VMWare Events MP for SCOM is the best SCOM also monitors virtual servers

MOM and nWorks Management Pack:

January 9, 2011 60 MOM and nWorks Management Pack nworks Collector is referred to as VEM (Virtual Enterprise Monitor) The VEM server can be a virtual server to reduce cost

Server Patching:

January 9, 2011 61 Server Patching Patching issues arise in two areas: VMware Software Patching – the VMware software platform must be patched Virtual Server Patching – the underlying virtual servers must be patched as normal VMware patching Esxupdate tool to apply software patches - a version of RPM (RedHat Patch Manager) Esxupdate is a single update mechanism for both software upgrades, drivers and patches

VMware Software Patching:

January 9, 2011 62 VMware Software Patching Upgrades and patches are distributed as bundles. Bundles are classified as security, critical or general You must subscribe to receive VMware patches. They are distributed monthly Esxupdate allows patches to be installed from a centralised server

Virtual Server Patching:

January 9, 2011 63 Virtual Server Patching Windows (and other) servers will be required to be patched as normal VMware can assist in a server patching strategy Allow server snapshots to be taken before patching takes place Reduce the testing effort by allowing an element of “implicit” testing where, unless problems occur, the patches remain applied

Stage 6 - Server Virtualisation Processes:

January 9, 2011 64 Stage 6 - Server Virtualisation Processes

Stage 6 - Policy-Based Virtual Service Life Cycle Management:

January 9, 2011 65 Stage 6 - Policy-Based Virtual Service Life Cycle Management Policies for Archiving unused test and development environments Quiescing enduring test environments Server patching Implicit UAT/OAT Reacting to requests for new servers Adding physical capacity Monitoring compliance with SLA Reporting performance

Project Implementation Process:

January 9, 2011 66 Project Implementation Process Structured process to deliver operational solution that meets requirements and that delivers on commitments

More Information:

January 9, 2011 67 More Information Alan McSweeney alan@alanmcsweeney.com