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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. Introduction Research: www.vmware.com http://blogs.msdn.com
Support.microsoft.com

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

7. Problem Statement
To make this:
Into this:

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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.

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. Results

16. 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.

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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

20. 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

21. References
Bisht A. . Clustering and High Availability: Network Load Balancing and Virtual Machines Available at Accessed March 23, 2010
. Network load Balancing. VMware Support and Downloads Available athttp:// Accessed March 23, 2010

22. Thank you for attending.
Feedback
Questions? Comments?
Thank you for attending.
Contact Information
Clinton Jones