Phoenix VMUG Teams Topic: Disaster Recover of vCenter Server What if the vCenter Server Fails?

1. Phoenix VMUG TeamsTopic: Disaster Recover of vCenter ServerWhat if the vCenter Server Fails?

2. Agenda Topics • Presentation Overview • What is vCenter Server • DR Team One Presentation • DR Team Two Presentation

3. Presentation Overview • At our last meeting (11/2008) we challenged the Phoenix VMUG users to two create two teams of 5 members and come up with a DR plan for a vCenter Server • Today they will be presenting their findings • Our hopes are that you can use this presentation as a guide to develop your own DR plan for vCenter Server in your Environment

4. Presentation Overview • Presentation Outline • Matt Mancini – vCenter Server Overview • Team 1 Presentation • Lead by Jason Schling of Macerich • Team 2 Presentation • Lead by Duke Encinas of Scottsdale Insurance

5. What is Virtual Center • By a show of hands • How many users know what vCenter Server is? • How many users have an active and tested DR plan for vCenter Server?

6. What is Virtual Center The vCenter Server provides a convenient single point of control to the datacenter. It provides many essential services such as access control, performance monitoring, and configuration. It unifies the resources from the individual computing servers to be shared among virtual machines in the entire datacenter. It accomplishes this by managing the assignment of virtual machines to the computing servers and the assignment of resources to the virtual machines within a given computing server based on the policies set by the system administrator.

7. What is Virtual Center • VM Provisioning – Guides and automates the provisioning of virtual machines • Host and VM Configuration – Allows the configuration of hosts and virtual machines • Resources and Virtual Machine Inventory Management – Organizes virtual machines and resources in the virtual environment and facilities their management. • Statistics and Logging – Logs and reports on the performance and resource utilization statistics of datacenter elements, such as virtual machines, hosts, and clusters

8. What is Virtual Center • Task Scheduler – Schedules actions such as VMotion to happen at a given time. • Consolidation – Analyzes the capacity and utilization of a datacenter’s physical resources. Provides recommendations for improving utilization by discovering physical systems that can be converted to virtual machines and consolidated onto • Distributed Services such as VMware DRS, VMware HA, and VMware VMotion. Distributed Services allow the configuration and management of these solutions centrally from vCenter Server.

9. What is Virtual Center • Alarms and Event Management – Tracks and warns users on potential resource over‐utilization or event conditions.

10. What is Virtual Center

11. What is Virtual Center • Virtual Center supported requirements: • CPU- 2.0GHZ or higher Intel or AMD x86 processor • Memory- 2GB RAM minimum • Disk Storage space- 560MB free space min – 2GB recommended • Can be run as a VM • Software requirements: • 32 bit versions of operating system only • Windows 2000 SP4 with update rollup 1 • Windows XP Pro • Windows 2003 Server SP1 or R2 • Virtual Center Database • Storage area for maintaining Virtual Center inventory as well as status of each VM and each managed host • Database formats: • Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, SQL Server Express • License –Server based license / Host Based

12. What is Virtual Center • What if the server fails?

13. Team One Presentation DR Team One Presentation Team Members: Jason Schling, Macerich Nate Fyie, Macerich Robert Cooley, Gradient Analytics Charles Braffett, See it Our Way

14. Team One Presentation Important concepts related to Virtual Center recovery - VM’s are portable files - Understand what your RTO and RPO are - Some major areas that can affect your ESX environment - Storage, Network, Backup and Recovery - NAS or SAN? - Storage protocols are important what do you use fiber, iSCSI or NFS? - Backups. Do I use tape, disk to disk or is replication enough?

15. Team One Presentation Important concepts related to Virtual Center recovery - Must plan for different types of scenarios and meet your RTO and RPO - Have you ever recovered from any of these, do you test frequently? - How does the network impact my disaster recovery plan - VLAN and server IP addressing in production and DR site - Is my bandwidth pipe large enough for replication - Must provide consistent storage, VM and network standards across the enterprise - Must have good documentation

16. Team One Presentation DR is now Production (RT 4 hours) (Production) (DR recovery) VM server A VM server B VM server C VM server D VM server E Virtual Center VM server A VM server B VM server C VM server D VM server E VM server … VM Network ESX 4, 5 VM Network Rescan for volumes Perform VC recovery ESX 1, 2, 3 MPLS WAN Virtual Center 1 Storage Network Storage Network RT 96 hours LTO Tape Library Data Replication Break Replication Restore Snap Shot Present storage Off – Site Storage of LTO tapes Storage Array 1 Fiber Channel Drives 10TB Storage Array 2 SATA Drives 20TB

17. Team One Presentation Virtual Center Recovery Steps

18. Team One Presentation Virtual Center Recovery Steps Validate replication with snap shot validation through storage management interfaceProvision storage in DR site for Read / Write access – present volumes to networkValidate networking configurationsPerform Virtual center recover - Login to http service of ESX server that hosts VC DR at DR site - Power on ESX servers - Via VC add in all ESX servers at DR site - Add required networking - Add required storage, for each storage volume add to inventory the VM - Power on each recovered VMFail back to production when DR is over

19. Team One Presentation Virtual Center Recovery Overview VM’s are essential files and hardware independent VM’s are easy to replicate / backup through third party software / process Ability to take snap shots and recover from snap shots Ability to clone snap shots for DEV / TEST to test DR VM’s can recover from tape or disk VM consolidation into standardized shareable storage Questions / answers?

20. Team Two Presentation DR Team Two Presentation

21. Team Two Presentation • What do you want to do with Virtual Center? • Determine what functions are needed in your environment • How difficult will it be for your team to support Virtual Center? • Different modes: Host Based and License server

22. Team Two Presentation • Host Based Advantages: • No license server to manage • Acceptable for a small number of ESX Hosts • Host Based Disadvantages: • Licenses not shared between hosts • Licenses are stored individually on ESX Server Hosts • Not all features are available, such as: • VMotion, HA and DRS

23. Team Two Presentation • License Server Mode advantages: • All functionality is available • All managed hosts need to be able to resolve and connect to License Server • LMTools (License Manager Tools) available to help reconcile issues with Virtual Center Licensing

24. Team Two Presentation • License Server Mode Disadvantages: • Not enough licenses installed on the Virtual Center License Server will make it difficult to start ESX Hosts managed by Virtual Center • Difficult to set up in multiple tiered Security/Network environment

25. Team Two Presentation • The Database is everything! • All performance information, Resource Pool information and Authentication information is stored in the database • “Losing the server that runs Virtual Center might result in a small period of downtime; However, losing the back-end database to Virtual Center could result in days of downtime and extended periods of rebuilding.” -Chris McCain, Mastering VMWare Infrastructure 3

26. Team Two Presentation • What database works best for you? • SQL Server Express not recommended for more than 5 ESX hosts and more than 50 VMs. Also there is a 4GB database max • Oracle vs. Microsoft SQL Server 2005 • Which is easier for you to manage? • Existing asset or new build?

27. Team Two Presentation • Size the Database accordingly! • Select the Performance Statistics Collections Level • Best Practices: • Past Day and Past Week - Level 3 • Past Month and Past Year - Level 1 • 90% of information collected is for Performance Statistics • Add sufficient space for growth and backups • Use Virtual Center Database Calculator

28. Team Two Presentation • Changing the collection cycle can have adverse effects: • Collection period by default is every five minutes • Change by 1 minute increases database size 20% • Infrequent collection times leads to invalid data

29. Team Two Presentation • Virtual or Physical database? • Depends on your confidence level in Virtual Technology • Where do your strengths lie? Virtual or physical • Virtual advantages: • Snapshot, VMotion, Storage VMotion and Resource Pools • Virtual disadvantages: • Reliant on ESX Host being available • Minimum of two ESX Host cluster to eliminate single Point of Failure

30. Team Two Presentation • Virtual Center Database options: • Clustered or stand alone? • VMWare recommends Microsoft Cluster • Is clustering a new configuration for your environment? • Increases complexity, what risk does this mitigate?

31. Team Two Presentation • Placement of Virtual Center: • Will Virtual Center server manage local only or remote ESX hosts as well? • Flat Network vs. Tiered DMZ Network • Management network in place? • Virtual Center Server should be placed where it can connect to all ESX Hosts, especially if templates are used to create VMs

32. Team Two Presentation • Recover Virtual Center: • If database is intact, redeploy new VM, install Virtual Center and point it to your Virtual Center Database • Consider building two Virtual Center servers • One powered on, one powered off, both configured to point to the Virtual Center database