Clinton A Jones Eastern Kentucky University Department of Technology Virtual Life Clinton A Jones Eastern Kentucky University Department of Technology

Outline Motivation: Need for more advanced network with limited space Introduction: Research on Virtualization Problem Statement: Install multiple virtual servers and configure them to load balance on the same physical disk Proposed Solution: How to solve the problem Implement Solution: Set Up and Test Proposed Solution Results and Conclusions: Success, or a Learning Experience? Future Work: Implementation

Motivation Servers take up precious, expensive physical space Many identities utilize multiple physical servers in a load balancing implementation Even small, home networks sometimes use multiple physical servers to store different resources on My own home network utilizes three separate servers for different, but necessary resources I need to make my network more flexible, but shrink it’s physical and environmental impact

Introduction This project investigates the corporate use of virtual server clusters and examines the feasibility of utilizing a scaled down application in a home network environment I wanted to minimize the space taken up by multiple physical servers, as well as the power consumption and heat production of those servers

Introduction Research: www.vmware.com http://blogs.msdn.com Support.microsoft.com http://www.dabcc.com http://lbvm.sourceforge.net

Problem Statement Develop Virtual Replicas of existing physical servers Develop load balancing protocols for said virtual servers to allow for smoother network traffic

Problem Statement To make this: Into this:

Proposed Solution Investigate pre-built virtual cluster solutions Investigate Free Solutions: Linux, Embedded Utilize Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V technologies Determine how each different virtual machine integrates with the host hardware, and how it communicates on the network

Proposed Solution Obtain Hard Disc Drives large enough to support multiple virtual environments Install and evaluate VirtualPC 2007, VMware, Virtual Box, and XEN for Linux. Evaluate Hercules Load Balancer Virtual Appliance for VMware

Implement Solution Installed openSUSE 11.2 and the XEN virtual environment Free Solution, however difficult to implement on my network Found it difficult to attach to shares from various Windows Flavors. NLB was non existant.

Implement Solution VirtualBOX Ubuntu Linux Samba easy to configure, shares easy to connect to from Windows. SWAT Web Interface for Samba easy to configure. Network Load Balancing difficult and unreasonable to implement in this scenario

Implement Solution VMware Successfully virtualized Mac OS X Virtualized Mac OS is almost useless for the task at hand No network communications from Mac OS or to Mac OS. Ill suited for server environment

Implement Solution VirtualPC Easy to setup, configure and get started Could only run one Virtual Machine at a time Since only one VM was active at a time, it was “virtually” impossible to implement NLB

Implement Solution Hercules Load Balancer Virtual Appliance Works with VMWare. “A tiny but mighty tcp load balancer” Can run on as little as 32MB of ram and as little as 4MB of disk space

Results

results Success in reducing the number of servers on my home network to a single physical machine Success in finding a new understanding of load balancing and mixed network environments Reduced the temperature in my “office” by several degrees, and notice my electricity bill has diminished.

Conclusions Found that NLB is more involved than I anticipated Unfortunately, was not able to implement load balancing to the degree that I wanted Settled on running multiple Virtual Machines with separate, unlike tasks to spread the workload over many virtual CPUS

Conclusions From my involvement in this project I learned that there are “stand alone” load balancer network appliances Similar to a hardware firewall in that it is a hardware and software package I have a new understanding, while still basic, of how to navigate, and survive in the Linux CLI

Conclusions I determined that multiple virtual servers on a single physical machine requires a hard wired network connection No two VM’s would utilize the wireless network connection at one time

Future Work Includes “remodeling” my host machine to include a more powerful CPU and multiple network cards Further pursuing the Hercules Load Balancer and Vmware Virtual Appliances to implement a true virtual cluster environment

References Bisht A. . Clustering and High Availability: Network Load Balancing and Virtual Machines. 2010. Available at http://blogs.msdn.com/clustering/archive/2009/03/09/9468109.aspx. Accessed March 23, 2010 . Network load Balancing. VMware Support and Downloads. 2010. Available athttp://www.vmware.com/support/esx21/doc/esx21admin_cluster_loadbal_esx.html. Accessed March 23, 2010

Thank you for attending. Feedback Questions? Comments? Thank you for attending. Contact Information Clinton Jones Clinton.a.jones@gmail.com