Adam Duffy Edina Public Schools

 Traditional server ◦ One physical server ◦ One OS ◦ All installed hardware is limited to that one server ◦ If hardware fails, server fails

 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

 Why did we go with VMware vSphere?  What other options are available? ◦ Microsoft Hyper-V ◦ Xen (Citrix XenServer)

 Use resources more efficiently  Physical server consolidation  Manage servers more efficiently  Reduce downtime, both planned and unplanned  Lots of tools

 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!

 Make an exact copy of a server without disturbing the live copy  “Let’s try this”  Production -> development

 Have a pre-configured version of an OS ready to deploy  Ease of deployment opens up new possibilities

 Move VMs between hosts with no downtime  VMs are automatically restarted when a host fails  Automatically balance computing capacity across hosts

 Easily add CPU, RAM, HD space, NIC  Minimize downtime

 Many vendors provide premade VMs for deploying their services  Cisco NCS  SAN failover manager

 Manage failover from production datacenters to disaster recovery sites

 Hardware ◦ Hosts  3x HP ProLiant DL380 G6  8x CPU cores per host, at GHz each  24 GB RAM per host ◦ Storage  2x HP StorageWorks P4300 G2 (LeftHand SAN)  5.5 TB usable  Software ◦ VMware vSphere 4

 Makes switching to virtual servers much easier  Can do it (mostly) live  Some success and some failure

(dramatic reenactment)

 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

 You’ll need outside help  Added complexity  When not to virtualize

 Supports larger VMs ◦ Up to 1 TB RAM and 32 virtual CPUs  Improvements to HA ◦ Easier to set up, more scalable  vSphere Web Client

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