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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.

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Virtually Limitless: Moving to Virtual Servers

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  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

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