1 / 28

Virtually Limitless: Moving to Virtual Servers

Virtually Limitless: Moving to Virtual Servers. Adam Duffy Edina Public Schools. What is a virtual server?. 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.

latona
Download Presentation

Virtually Limitless: Moving to Virtual Servers

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript


  1. Virtually Limitless: Moving to Virtual Servers Adam Duffy Edina Public Schools

  2. What is a virtual server?

  3. 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

  4. 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

  5. What is a virtual server?

  6. What products are available for virtualizing? • Why did we go with VMware vSphere? • What other options are available? • Microsoft Hyper-V • Xen (Citrix XenServer)

  7. What advantages does virtualization provide? • Use resources more efficiently • Physical server consolidation • Manage servers more efficiently • Reduce downtime, both planned and unplanned • Lots of tools

  8. Snapshots • 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!

  9. Live clone • Make an exact copy of a server without disturbing the live copy • “Let’s try this” • Production -> development

  10. Templates • Have a pre-configured version of an OS ready to deploy • Ease of deployment opens up new possibilities

  11. vMotion, HA, and DRS • Move VMs between hosts with no downtime • VMs are automatically restarted when a host fails • Automatically balance computing capacity across hosts

  12. Adding and removing resources • Easily add CPU, RAM, HD space, NIC • Minimize downtime

  13. Vendor-provided VMs • Many vendors provide premade VMs for deploying their services • Cisco NCS • SAN failover manager

  14. Site Recovery Manager • Manage failover from production datacenters to disaster recovery sites

  15. How we got started • 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 (LeftHandSAN) • 5.5 TB usable • Software • VMware vSphere 4

  16. Converting physical to virtual • Makes switching to virtual servers much easier • Can do it (mostly) live • Some success and some failure

  17. Before (dramatic reenactment)

  18. After • 10 CPUs, 22 cores • Using 13.2 GHz / 97.5 GHz • 288 GB RAM • Using 151 GB • 34 TB usable storage • Using 24 TB • 10 TB is high performance • 44 virtual servers

  19. Possible downsides • You’ll need outside help • Added complexity • When not to virtualize

  20. New features in vSphere 5.0/5.1 • Supports larger VMs • Up to 1 TB RAM and 32 virtual CPUs • Improvements to HA • Easier to set up, more scalable • vSphere Web Client

  21. Questions? • adaduffy@edina.k12.mn.us • 952-848-4993

More Related