Red Riders and Pink Nightmares: A Journey into Virtualization. Darren Schoen Director of Technology Infrastructure, Broward Center for the Performing Arts

First Things First….

Did you say Virtualization????

Red Ryders=Awesome

Pink Nightmare = Not so Awesome

Business Need Employees at Remote Location On Separate Network that had stringent security. Able to get to Internet Cheap Needed BCPA internal network access

Solution(s)! Remote Access Solved (GoToMyPC) Buy each employee PC and set up in vacant Cube (not cost effective) VIRTUALIZATION!

What about this Virtualization? Density, Density, Density Ease of Administration Cost Effectiveness Best use of hardware

Amount of Bacon Tastiness

Density of VMs in Environment Amount of Savings

Vendors We Looked At XenServer (Citrix) VMWare ESX 3.5 Microsoft (Not Hyper-V at that time) Virtual Iron (Xen Based)

Basis of Comparison Ease of Implementation Support Structure (Online and by Company) Price Scalability Product Maturity

Results VMWare Citrix (Xen Based) Microsoft Virtual Iron (Xen Based) Ease of Implementation Red Ryder Pink NightmareRed Ryder SupportRed RyderPink NightmareRed RyderPink Nightmare PricePink NightmareRed Ryder ScalabilityRed Ryder Pink NightmareRed Ryder Maturity of Product Red Ryder Pink NightmareRed Ryder

Conclusion

Bacon

Why? Online Support Community Maturity of Product (It’s bulletproof!) Scalability Transparent Page Sharing Memory Overcommit Memory Overcommit!!

Density of VMs in Environment Amount of Savings

My Roadmap Build Server Install Free VMWare Server Product (at the time, this ran on top of Windows) Rock and Roll with VMs! Establish Proof of Concept and start scaling up VMWare environment!

The Joys of ESX Implementation Red Ryders: Ease of Installation Stability Migration of current VM objects Pink Nightmares: Hardware, Hardware, Hardware Licensing, Licensing, Licensing

The Story, Just After Implementation 1 Stand-Alone ESXi 3.5 VMWare Box w/2TB+ storage. 16GB RAM, Dual Quad-Core Procs. Total of 10 VMs (not close to being maxed out) Managed as a stand-alone box, no cloning or migration. All Windows XP OS VMs All used as ‘desktops’ for remote users connecting by GoToMyPC No Backup scheme implemented Total Spent: ~$3500…approximately $350 per VM. Total Savings up to this point: $3000.

The Story, 2yrs later…. 4 Stand-Alone ESXi Boxes, each with 2TB+ internal storage Total of 63 VMs (not maxed out by a longshot) Minimum of 42 VMs on at any given time Managed by Vcenter Scheduled tasks to clone mission critical VMs to different VM host on separate partition. Backup SW on each server VM VM objects include: Exchange Servers SQL Servers Application/Web Servers Workstations Total Spent: ~$30,000..about $ per VM Approximate Savings: ~$75,000

What about Hyper-V? Overhead From our experience, more than VMWare Even ‘bare-metal’ install uses most of Server 2008 install files Performance No Transparent Page Sharing No Simultaneous Live Migration No Memory Overcommit!

Final Thoughts Bottom Line (based on my first hand experience): You don’t need to spend $50,000 to get a robust Virtual Environment, you can start with 10% of that. For any Mission Critical Application, VMWare is the only solution that I would feel comfortable implementing

Questions?