Server Virtualisation Project Proposal

[gshaw]

I'm just about to start writing up a proposal for our server replacement programme next year (need to get in there early to plan for the funds!) and the main focus of it will be on virtualisation.

 

Just wondering if anyone has some of the intro text that they'd be willing to share as I guess we've all wrote about the same things regarding power savings, DR and so on so seems silly to re-invent the wheel?

 

I guess the following issues also need to come into play...

 

- VMWare vs Hyper-V (licensing costs vs "free")

- OS upgrade to Server 2008

- storage, SAN consolidation and justifying the cost that goes with it, will it perform?

- changes to backup solution, might need to change how we do things to suit VMs, Acronis looks better than Backup Exec at the moment but there might be more options?

 

Any other advice for what helped get you the go-ahead for a project and any pitfalls to watch out for would be much appreciated

[Duke]

Heh, do you want the long version or the short version? I get kinda verbose sometimes...

 

Let me modify the docs a little to remove some references to our site and then I'll send you them. I should probably email you them rather than post them here for everyone, can you PM me your email address?

 

Cheers,

Chris

[nicholab]

VMWare vs Hyper-V (licensing costs vs "free") is and as clear cut as this to give you all the features you need with Hyper-V you may need to pay for extras form Citrix such as Hyper-V essentials.

 

Also VMware have also change the licensing cost so you pay for the management engine.

 

Also if you get a SAN that does file serving direct this can be quite useful.

[TechMonkey]

Woah, I was just making a start on this as well & thinking of posting some questions!

 

Just reading up on Hyper-V & trying to think of a way to set up a test install

[dwhyte85]

Hyper-V is a bit limiting in some ways, had massive issues with network cards on 2003 server installs... it seems to like 2008 better, so I guess it's a little bit limiting in terms of OS hosted.

 

I'm sure you already know this but I didn't rtfm and lost my horny with Hyper-V when it didn't support the NICs from 2003, didn't want to allocate it's own physical NIC

[Duke]

Having played extensively with both Hyper-V, ESX/ESXi and Xen, I seriously consider you guys give ESXi a try as a priority. I found Xen the easiest to get into, VMware the most powerful and flexible tool, and Hyper-V comparatively a nightmare. I'm not saying it's a bad product and I'm not saying it's not worth using, but I found VMware to be so much better designed and more mature. ESXi is free, and if you want all the full features to play with you can get a full ESX trial with vCenter.

[gshaw]

Already one step ahead there We have a test network with Core2Quad CPUs that were running HyperV and recently I reinstalled one of the boxes with ESXi... very impressed so far. I'm thinking of taking one of our Dual Core \ Dual CPU Opteron servers and putting ESXi on over the summer to handle low-load server apps e.g. Blackberry Express, print server and so on, which could then be easily migrated to the full ESX system if we go down that route.

 

I want rid of Windows File Servers end of, had enough of updates, AV and so on with our DL380 NAS over the years so much prefer the idea of the SAN doing the same job with less overhead. In a way this kinda shows why I'm leaning towards VMware as why do the same issue again with managing Windows as a virtualisation base when ESX can do the same from a 16MB flash chip built into a G6 server?!

 

The SAN is the area that gives me headaches, so far I've got EMC, NetApp and HP\Lefthand in the options list... each gonna be pricy and then iSCSI or fiber (probably the former due to price)

 

Might have to change the backup system as well, is anyone using Acronis out there?

[nicholab]

Why no Sun S7000 on your list of SANs?

[Duke]

[...] I'm leaning towards VMware as why do the same issue again with managing Windows as a virtualisation base when ESX can do the same from a 16MB flash chip built into a G6 server?!

 

Hehe, exactly.

 

Why no Sun S7000 on your list of SANs?

 

+100 on this one. We've got a 7410 and are very happy. If you can get it at the right price (Oracle are messing around with the educational price at the moment) then I'd very, very strongly recommend you look at the S7000 as your storage solution. It'll get rid of all your Windows file servers by doing CIFS, it'll be your virtualisation platform through NFS, and it'll offer low-latency block-level disk access through iSCSI. Management is great, and if you get the budget one day you can cluster the heads and get another for replication and a DR site.

 

Chris

[bossman]

Sun 7110 here with 2 Xenserver hosts attached and running various VMs working extremely well for the amount of time we have to spend on it as we are also running a proof of concept on our CC4 new network which is currently at phase 3 (application building and testing) webman has been outstanding in this remit (big pat on the back for him) and my other part time technician Tallan has also been working well to take up the slack and allow myself and webman the time to crack on with the job at hand.

 

All in all been a very fruitfull couple of months

[36Degrees]

We had a couple of old 'servers' (one was just a PC with Server 2003 on) that started getting a little temperamental. Consolodating into one server would have been a potential nightmare due to the apps they were running so I bought an ML110 G6 and put VMWare ESXi 4 on it. It only has a SATA drive but for around £700 I get a server with 8GB RAM, 2TB HDD and a 5 Year NBD OS warranty.

 

The 2 virtual servers are much faster than the physical ones they replaced and as they were already licenced there were no costs involved, as there would have been for Hyper-V, etc. I have a couple more servers that don't run anything massively intensive also on ageing physical servers so I am going to migrate those too at some point.

 

Oh, almost forgot - I also have a Dell OptiPlex 745 I bought second-hand on eBay that currently has ESXi on plus a multitude of virtual machines for testing and development purposes, both personal and work related!

Edited May 14, 2010 by 36Degrees

[gshaw]

Have to admit Sun has never been mentioned by any of our suppliers or the numerous phone calls coming in though I did get some info at BETT, would be interesting to see how their prices compare for a Sun SAN \ server "kit" compared to the same from HP etc.

[Duke]

These are ballpark figures, and also based on Sun's 'Edu-Promo' pricing that's currently on hold, but the NetApp quote I had for what we needed (we already had some NetApp kit) came to £120k, and obviously if we wanted any additional protocols that weren't covered in that we'd have to buy them separately. The Sun stuff came in at about £37.5k and included all protocols and support.

[Soulfish]

These are ballpark figures, and also based on Sun's 'Edu-Promo' pricing that's currently on hold, but the NetApp quote I had for what we needed (we already had some NetApp kit) came to £120k, and obviously if we wanted any additional protocols that weren't covered in that we'd have to buy them separately. The Sun stuff came in at about £37.5k and included all protocols and support.

 

If your netapp pricing came in like that I can't wait to see ours in a few months time once we tender for our new storage system

[Duke]

If your netapp pricing came in like that I can't wait to see ours in a few months time once we tender for our new storage system

 

This is going back nearly a couple of years now, but it's still not cheap. The NetApp stuff is top-tier kit, right alongside EMC, but it comes at a price that I don't think many schools can meet. Companies will try to push a FAS2020 on to you and it's just not a good enough product in many cases. The CPUs are underpowered and it won't scale at all, whereas for the same money can can get stuff that will. Add into that the way the price the licensing (compared to Sun's 'you buy the hardware, you get it all') and the quotes quickly get nasty.

[teejay]

VMWare ESXi here, using Sun S7000 storage. Dukes 7410 is the top of the range S7000 box, not that I'm jealous or anything lol. We have a 7310, the next model down, which we use for all our network shares, roaming profiles and redirected My Docs etc and it handles the load very, very easily (1400 student secondary) and is a lot cheaper than the 7410. We run the virtualisation storage on 2x 7110's which are the base models of the S7000 series, again have absolutely no problems with their performance and in fact if we'd realised how good they perform would've integrated the virtualisation onto the 7310 tbh.

[Duke]

We definitely would have gone for a 7310 had it been around at the time, don't worry!

 

A 7310 would handle what we needed fine, but we bought our 7410 a while ago and the 7310 wasn't even on the roadmap at the time. I wanted something properly scalable (the budget was there so I figured make the most of it) so I felt the 7410 would suit us better than a 7110 or 7210 looking at the long-term.

 

Of course, I'm now equally jealous of the 6-core 7410 boxes that I missed out on...

 

7410 hardware update, and analyzing the HyperTransport : Brendan Gregg

 

Chris

[Tallwood_6]

To be fair the arguement that you have to pay extra to licence additional features on many of the other SANS's out there isnt quite as valid as it was a year or two ago. The Dell Equallogic & HP Lefthand P4000 series SAN's are extremely good and have pretty much all the features licenced out the box. I'd get some demo's on a number of solutions and see what best suits your needs as they each have key selling points, the SUN offers and array of functionality and protocol support, Equallogic argueably has a very easy to use front end, Lefthand have the hightly scalable network raid concept etc.

[glennda]

Hiya,

 

Just another one to add to your list of hypervisor stuff if Linux KVM. This does require an good knowledge of Linux to get into but is still in early stages. We currently are running 14 VM's on one box in a production enviroment using this running on a DL380 G5 dual quad xeon and 64gb ram connected to a fibre channel Hp san (doesnt even use the full amount provided could add more servers onto it but don't need them!). we also have another host which (probly more realistic to alot of people on here) is the exactly the same server apart from 12gb ram and will quite happily run 6 vm's (3 file servers with aprox 150 users each, 1 dc and sims and fog) with plenty to play with spare.

 

Toby

[SYNACK]

The 2 virtual servers are much faster than the physical ones they replaced and as they were already licenced there were no costs involved, as there would have been for Hyper-V, etc.

 

What were the costs, Hyper-V server is free just like ESXi.

 

Hyper-V does have a legacy network adapter option that is supported by 2003 out of the box and you can use the default ones if you install the hyper-v client extensions in the VM.

[Tallwood_6]

Its free to a point, hyper v really benifits from having misocroft systems center and esxi free will only licence one physical processor and is feature limited.

[teejay]

Its free to a point, hyper v really benifits from having misocroft systems center and esxi free will only licence one physical processor and is feature limited.

 

Erm, nope, Esxi free licence is not limited to one processor, you select the number of physical processors when downloading the licence and software. The limitation is 4 way virtual SMP. The main bits missing are high availability and backup. HA is not really needed in schools, if you have a hardware failure you can just mount the virtual server on another server and start it, so you have about 1-2 minutes downtime. Backup can be done using various scripts available.

[Tallwood_6]

Erm, nope, Esxi free licence is not limited to one processor, you select the number of physical processors when downloading the licence and software. The limitation is 4 way virtual SMP. The main bits missing are high availability and backup. HA is not really needed in schools, if you have a hardware failure you can just mount the virtual server on another server and start it, so you have about 1-2 minutes downtime. Backup can be done using various scripts available.

 

I stand corrected. Depending on the edition you buy into though your also missing update manager, hot add, fault tolerance, vmotion, storage vmotion and vcenter support which are all important features in my book if your spending large amounts of money on a SAN and new hosts and hope to fully leverage the hardware. I appreciate this is a cost many may not be able to justify though.

[SYNACK]

I stand corrected. Depending on the edition you buy into though your also missing update manager, hot add, fault tolerance, vmotion, storage vmotion and vcenter support which are all important features in my book if your spending large amounts of money on a SAN and new hosts and hope to fully leverage the hardware. I appreciate this is a cost many may not be able to justify though.

 

A lot of this you do get free with Hyper-V, live migration for 1-2 second failover, cluster support for multiple host boxes and a shared filesystem. It comes down to what kind of VM'ed OSs you are going to run and which product you think will fit your deployment best.

[teejay]

Well, we have been fully server virtualised since last September and partially server virtualised for over 2 years and I can honestly say that I've never required any of the extra features of ESX over ESXi. Yes if I was running 50+ servers in a 24/7/365 environment then I would need them, but that's not the environment you have in a school.

We tested Hyper-V, Xen, ESXi and for us ESXi was by far the best, but you really need to sit down and test these products yourself and do some P2V testing of your current servers in a test environment to see which works best for you. Don't forget to try P2V on some of those linux servers etc if you have any :-)