DAckroyd Posted February 4, 2009 Posted February 4, 2009 In the short term, over the next year or two depending on funding, we are looking to virtualise 5 or 6 of our physical servers (not our CC3 domain controllers). Unless I get a big budget hike, I am going to be using the free version VMWare ESXi 3.5 coupled with a SAN of some kind. Now I had planned the SAN to be an off the shelf iSCSI box such as Adaptec Snap Server or a HP 2000i. But having just discovered "Openfiler" I am going to install that on a test workstation to try it out. Is there any reason you are looking at iSCSI rather than fibre channel? If cost is the issue look at the MSA2000's (we use the dual controller version) good solid bottom end SAN. Even thought it doesn't use an 8Gbps Fibre channel connector yet (currently only 4gbps) it does work using 8Gbps kit and it's actually cheaper than 4Gbps equiverlants. also andrew, are you planning on connecting your RM CC3 server things to the SAN? as if you have the datastore already set on there that may make it easier when you come to move the servers over?
DSapseid Posted February 4, 2009 Posted February 4, 2009 Does anyone have any thoughts on Citrix XenServer? I have got the 30 day trial version but havent really had a good chance to play with it yet.
tmcd35 Posted February 4, 2009 Posted February 4, 2009 Now I had planned the SAN to be an off the shelf iSCSI box such as Adaptec Snap Server or a HP 2000i. But having just discovered "Openfiler" I am going to install that on a test workstation to try it out. Please let us know how you get on with Openfiler. I may be looking at it myself early next year. I was going to base our SAN around SANMelody which I have used before and is a fantastic piece of software. But free is one hell of an attractive price!
k-strider Posted February 5, 2009 Posted February 5, 2009 I am in the middle of moving as much as possible over to Virtualised infrastructure. at the moment i have a single Hyper-V (Core Enterprise) server 10GB and 2 quad core xeons 1U intel with mirrored Disks. It runs just Dandy at the moment, though i wouldn't like to put much more on it. 1 MO Sharepoint 2007 Server (Front End not DB) 1 EPortal (CMIS Web Front End) 1 Moodle Server <- on win2k3 lightly used experimental.. not happy that the DB is on the VHD but don't know enough about linux or moodle to set it up properly.. 1 Heritage 2K8 Library System server. Old kelidos V2 server (again under used another story) and MSDE on VHD it also ran QCA onscreen testing and runs Edexcel server when required. I am going to get another next year and do the 2k8r2 load balancing thingymebob My Question is on SAN this is where i would like to know what people do... do you attach the SAN to the Hyper-V/Virtual host and dump the VHDs on it or do you in the Virtual Servers add an iSCSI host and offer the SAN space direct to the Virtual host data D: Drive as it were... <- im thinking this might be better for Light DB stuff .. or you could start to visualize file servers maybe? I will have a look at Openfiler as i was looking at Linux for SAN as i want to do it myself and Win doesn't do it out the Box :-( again Core would have been ideal!
tmcd35 Posted February 5, 2009 Posted February 5, 2009 My Question is on SAN this is where i would like to know what people do... do you attach the SAN to the Hyper-V/Virtual host and dump the VHDs on it or do you in the Virtual Servers add an iSCSI host and offer the SAN space direct to the Virtual host data D: Drive as it were... <- im thinking this might be better for Light DB stuff .. or you could start to visualize file servers maybe? I will have a look at Openfiler as i was looking at Linux for SAN as i want to do it myself and Win doesn't do it out the Box :-( again Core would have been ideal! The idea behind the SAN (and virtualisation for that matter) is that you have multiple Hyper-V servers in a Failover Cluster. The same LUNs (hard drive partitions) on the SAN are connected to all of the Hyper-V servers via iSCSI (or Fibre). The VHD's are then stores on the SAN. All HDD's in your VM's should be VHD's stored on the SAN. This means that all Hyper-V servers can see all VHD's. This is what allows the High Availability and Live Migration features of Hyper-V to function. To set this up correctly you will need Win2k8-R2 which finally allows file level locking rather than partition level locking and thus multiple Hyper-V servers can access the same LUN. Win2k8-R1 locks the LUN to the first Hyper-V server to attach to it and so Live Migration is not currently available. High Availability works because when the initial Hyper-V server fails the LUN is released for another Hyper-V server to pick up. 1
DAckroyd Posted February 5, 2009 Posted February 5, 2009 My Question is on SAN this is where i would like to know what people do... do you attach the SAN to the Hyper-V/Virtual host and dump the VHDs on it or do you in the Virtual Servers add an iSCSI host and offer the SAN space direct to the Virtual host data D: Drive as it were... <- im thinking this might be better for Light DB stuff .. or you could start to visualize file servers maybe? ! I don't know about 2K8R2 Hyper-V but the current version you can't address the SAN or even network cards directly - they all go through the origional machine which was there before the Hyper-V went on (or the first server you build assumably if using free standalone version
tmcd35 Posted February 5, 2009 Posted February 5, 2009 I don't know about 2K8R2 Hyper-V but the current version you can't address the SAN or even network cards directly - they all go through the origional machine which was there before the Hyper-V went on (or the first server you build assumably if using free standalone version That's interesting, one up for VMWare then! So you can't assign a RAW iSCSI LUN to a VM with Hyper-V?
DAckroyd Posted February 5, 2009 Posted February 5, 2009 That's interesting, one up for VMWare then! So you can't assign a RAW iSCSI LUN to a VM with Hyper-V? I'm not too experianced in this so I'll leave it to some of the guys already using Hyper-V
pantscat Posted February 17, 2009 Posted February 17, 2009 I've got a few questions about virtualising... Does Hyper-V have anything along the lines of the VMware-converter? Does it have anything to allow automatic fail-over? What are the benefits of using a SAN (such as the Sun 7110) over a NAS box such as a Netapp S330? Also - does anyone have a useful formula for speccing boxes for virtualisation? Cheers, Ant
Theblacksheep Posted February 17, 2009 Posted February 17, 2009 (edited) I've got a few questions about virtualising... Does Hyper-V have anything along the lines of the VMware-converter? Does it have anything to allow automatic fail-over? What are the benefits of using a SAN (such as the Sun 7110) over a NAS box such as a Netapp S330? SCVMM It has the ability to restart on another host with Enterprise or Datacenter. It can also quick migrate (pause->move->unpause) if the host is still running. Live migration is an 2008R2 feature. Edited February 17, 2009 by Theblacksheep
teejay Posted February 17, 2009 Posted February 17, 2009 One thing that worries me about using a SAN is if you are using one SAN device, if it fails then you lose all your virtual servers, which to me seems a bigger problem than losing one real server.
tmcd35 Posted February 17, 2009 Posted February 17, 2009 There is a question as to just how redundant you can make your network. Whatever you do, however much money you spend, you're unlikely to every eliminate the risk of a single point of failure. By not using a SAN/NAS you lose High Availabilty and Live Migration of your VM's. But by using them the SAN/NAS can become that single point of failure. IMHO, A well designed SAN with redundant PSU and LAN, RAID5/6 with hot spare drives, connected to a UPS is more preferable than trying to work without a SAN.
teejay Posted February 17, 2009 Posted February 17, 2009 Yes but it's only when you start getting into the higher end SAN stuff like EMC that you start getting true redundancy in the SAN and they can cost a lot of money. On cheaper SANS, even with redundant PSU's, hot spare HDD in RAID, UPS you still have the risk of Fan/CPU/Motherboard/RAID Controller/Memory failures. You've also got the problem that you are putting the servers running the VM's under higher load and therefore possibly liable to a higher failure rate. If you go for a clustered SAN to get real High Availability, you then introduce a much higher level of complexity which can cause its own problems. Yes I can see this being a good solution for large business and universities where you have say 50+ application servers, but I can't see the advantages in a normal school where there really aren't that many servers. Just thinking aloud really and I'm always careful of the latest coolaid which every man and his dog is trying to sell us!
DAckroyd Posted February 18, 2009 Posted February 18, 2009 Yes but it's only when you start getting into the higher end SAN stuff like EMC that you start getting true redundancy in the SAN and they can cost a lot of money. On cheaper SANS, even with redundant PSU's, hot spare HDD in RAID, UPS you still have the risk of Fan/CPU/Motherboard/RAID Controller/Memory failures. You've also got the problem that you are putting the servers running the VM's under higher load and therefore possibly liable to a higher failure rate. If you go for a clustered SAN to get real High Availability, you then introduce a much higher level of complexity which can cause its own problems. Yes I can see this being a good solution for large business and universities where you have say 50+ application servers, but I can't see the advantages in a normal school where there really aren't that many servers. SANs: Even cheap SAN's like the HP MSA2000 has a dual controller version and that should be fine for most schools as it can be extended with 3 more shelves if you think that 4.5TB isn't enough storage with SAS 15krpm drives. I would guess that most companies have a single controller version on offer but there will almost certainly be a dual controller version also. if you are unsure of what you want to get try contacting one of your suppliers as they will have knowlage on what would work best for you. I was once worried about similar stuff but if you think this technology has been around quite some time now and if huge companies with super secure and always needed data are happy to put everything onto one system like this the we should be fine. where I used to work we has a vm system put in and I saw how good it was I got one in in my new place as soon as possible. as I said earlier in this thread, if you are unsure of going down the VM/SAN route then talk to schools in your area that have setups already. don't forget also if you don't want to go down the VM route then SAN's still will offer great value as you can connect them to your physical servers meaning you can get away with only needing system drives in your physical boxes and then you can dump all data onto the SAN which is cheap and easier to upgrade. you can also connect a couple of VM hosts to the SAN as a way of progessing across or just for running a test enviroment?
garethEds Posted April 15, 2009 Author Posted April 15, 2009 I have used VMware converter, it has worked excellent for me. One bit of advice never use it on a DC you can cause problems with replication and end up with 2 different versions of AD. With this in mind - if you are creating a domain controller from scratch - is it a good/reasonable idea to do this? Or are domain controllers better on their own physical machine? Cheers GJE
DAckroyd Posted April 15, 2009 Posted April 15, 2009 if you are building a machine of from scratch then you don't have to do a P2V conversion - just build from template or ISO or from WDS Domain controllers are great things on VM's as you can split out roles between VM's to help security. I have a physical Domain Controller as a just in case thing but it's not essential and it's just on a cheap HP rack server (DL120)
danrhodes Posted January 14, 2010 Posted January 14, 2010 We did a domain migration, and we used vmware conveter to take a copy of all the old servers to run a practice on. We had 12 running on 1 in the end it was brilliant! They ran better than the real things.Both the test and the migration were very succesfuly. We curently looking at virtulsing all our lesser servers still think i want to keep my DC's and file servers "real" For file servers you can virtualize the OS and use Direct I/O passthrough on a SAN or iSCSI for the Data drive. Thay way you have even less hardware and are left with a lovely expandable Storage box also! D
sted Posted January 14, 2010 Posted January 14, 2010 (edited) I've got a few questions about virtualising... Does Hyper-V have anything along the lines of the VMware-converter? Ant microsoft has an application disk2vhd that you run on a live server it clones it to a vhd file then dump it into hyperv. Seems to work quite well one of out schools has 0 money and both admin and curric servers are getting on (admin is past it) so i took a p2v copy of it (bear in mind it the dc and has every role all data etc) and dumped it onto a 2008r2 server in the offic running hyperv and apart from a few issues (mainly i haddnt sp2'd the 2003 box it) p2v'd it booted up fine no problems and seemed to work ok as did sims etc. Plan now is to replac vurric server and run admin as a virtual server on that only issue i see is printers a i usually end up using hyperv for 2003 x86 print servers to makemy life easier than trying to find identical x86 and x64 drivers. Im also in the process of playing with termial serve 2008 which im intending to run as a hyper v on the schoool server Edited January 14, 2010 by sted
danrhodes Posted January 14, 2010 Posted January 14, 2010 I would recommend install SCVMM as well its very helpfull and it can do P2V alot better than Disk2VHD can! D
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