How to choose a hypervisor

1. How to choose a hypervisor PING-Philly Jeffrey S. McGovern irishredbeard@gmail.com

2. Many thanks • I want to make sure I give credit to Tim Mackey – XenServer Evangelist from who I borrowed a big portion of the concepts for this presentation • http://www.slideshare.net/TimMackey/collab-hypervisor-selection-28746763

3. What is this based on? • VMWare – 5.5 • http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere5/r55/vsphere-55-configuration-maximums.pdf • Xen – 6.2 • http://support.citrix.com/servlet/KbServlet/download/34966-102-704363/CTX137837_XenServer%206_2_0_Configuration%20Limits.pdf • Hyper-V – Windows 2012 • http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj680093.aspx

4. How did I get started • Random google searches turning up • http://www.virtualizationmatrix.com/matrix.php?category_search=All&free_based=1 • http://blogs.technet.com/b/pracheta/archive/2014/01/22/vmware-or-microsoft-quick-comparison-between-vsphere-5-5-and-windows-server-2012-r2-hyper-v.aspx

5. Who is making hypervisors? Pay Open Source Redhat – KVM LXC – Linux containers Citrix – Xen Server • VMWare – Vsphere • Citrix – Xen Server • Microsoft – Hyper-V • IBM – z/VM • Oracle - Oracle VM

6. Consumers

7. Know thy user baseConsumers are not just users • Users • Want things like windows vslinux • Operate IaaS machines • Run things like chef/puppet/ansible • Login using ssh/keys • Use applications that are built on top of the hypervisor • Request access to applications • Build applications

8. Know thy user baseConsumers are not just users • Consumers • Do things like audit for compliance • CSO and compliance • Support applications • Patch – operations org • Install – transition org • Support – helpdesk • Need to validate and assess current security practices for applications that are run on top of the hypervisor • Security • Worry about billing and charge back • CFO if internal • product manager if external facing

9. Know thy operator

10. Know thy operatorsThe big groups • Do teams work well together? • What happens when an application is slow? • If it is storage is this a networking or storage problem? • If it is the network is it the virtual access layer or the physical world? • How will escalations work? • Does the operations staff have a good mechanism for getting to engineering?

11. Know thy operatorWhen there is “the” operator • If the staff is small who will help where? • How are contracts structured? • For open source make sure you are participating in the community? • For pay resources make sure you are using them? • Know your account team!

12. Tenancy

13. Single tenant solutions • Why would you build a single tenant solution? • There is no reason to build a multi-tenant one! • Standard enterprises • Development environment where you just need machines and not privacy • There is a reason to build a single tenant solution • Security reasons • Resource reasons • Performance reasons

14. Multi-tenant solutions • Providers • You are a provider and this is what you do • Enterprises • You have highly structured business units that work like external customers • You have a development environment which requires segregation for either stability or security concerns • You have many external vendors working on a single project • Highly secure environments trying to capture economy of scale • Research

15. Offerings

16. What are you trying to do? • What are you trying get from all of this • Economy of scale? • Virtualize the planet and stop buying hardware • Saving money? • What does the consumer base need? • OS/hardware specifications • Is one group operating the environment and another supporting the users and consumers? • Is the service just a computer or are other services offered as well • Backups • Monitoring • Security

17. What are you trying to do? • Regardless of tenancy model who owns the data? • Who owns responsibility to collect and show metrics? • How do you collect and show metrics? • Compliance • Standard usage • Who do you need to show metrics to in the org? • How is any of this billed?

18. Integration with infrastructure

19. Networking

20. Network services

21. Network resources

22. Network virtualization

23. Storage

24. Performance based storage

25. Bulk storage • Does it ALL need to be primary storage? • If not how is the bulk storage accessed? • There are VM interface limits! • There are throughput limits • How is the bulk storage mounted on the hypervisor? • Max datastores still apply!

26. Hypervisor

27. Hypervisor resource limitsHost

28. Hypervisor resource limitsVM

29. Hypervisor Clustering

30. Do you really need clustering? • If your deployment is small enough do you really need clustering? • Shared storage will allow you to import the VMs back onto another host • Upgrading gets a lot easier • Depending on your hypervisor networking does not get any harder.

31. Use case

32. Research Compute Security Storage Require to onboard Terabytes of data High performing storage absolute requirement • High end technical processing • Lots of memory • Lots of cpu • Lots of linux • Extreme security concerns over IP • Regulated by multiple governing bodies

33. Research continued • IT organization was trying to compete with researchers getting grants and simply buying servers and stashing them under desks or in offices • Not a lot of money to spend on this project • Researchers could care less about underlying platform as long as their stuff ran well • Organization has multiple levels of support

34. Research Compute Security Storage Huge amounts of data Data needs very binary in that they needed to either be high end performance or it was basically bulk file store • Standard datacenter • Some big • Some tiny • Applications were all over the place in terms of usage • Looking to solve standard best practices

35. Medium enterprise continued • Physical servers were going EoS/EoL • Company was paying astronomical amount for maintenance • Users did not care about the platform. Lots of consumers were weighing in heavily • Organization had flat support level with a series of specialists