1. Building a Virtual Infrastructure
Gary Wroblewski
Application Coordinator
The Herbert H. and Grace A. Dow
College of Health Professions

2. Overview What is virtualization? Why do we need it or want it?
Who are the major vendors
Why do we need it or want it?
Where can we use it?
How can we use virtualization to increase our customer responsiveness?
How did we plan and deploy it?
Any lessons?
Major vendors: Vmware, Xen, Microsoft
Why: Management, application isolation, consolidation.

3. What is virtualization?
Virtualization is a term that refers to the abstraction of computer resources.
This includes making a single physical resource (such as a server, an operating system, an application, or storage device) appear to function as multiple logical resources.
The principal of virtualization was founded in the days of mainframe computers, and has been around since the 1960’s.
Source:

4. Virtualization software options
Microsoft Virtual Server
VMware
Workstation
VMware Server
Free
Runs on top of Windows/Linux
ESX server
Datacenter class management and scalability
Redhat based Kernel
Xen
Linux based platform
Open Source
Only supports Linux VM’s currently.

5. Virtual Machine Ware
Software that allocates portions of hardware to act as virtual servers, yet exist on the same physical machine.

6. Who uses VMWare?

7. Why virtualize? Server Consolidation Disaster Recovery
Software testing and validation
Server consolidation
-consolidate many physical servers into fewer servers. AKA Physical-to-Virtual or 'P2V' transformation.
Disaster recovery
-hot standby environments for physical production servers
-backup images that can "boot" into live VM

8. Nitty Gritty details… Partitioning
Multiple applications and operating systems can be supported within a single physical system
Servers can be consolidated into virtual machines on either a scale-up or scale-out architecture
Computing resources are treated as a uniform pool to be allocated to virtual machines in a controlled manner
Encapsulation
Complete virtual machine environment is saved as a single file; easy to back up, move and copy
Standardized virtualized hardware is presented to the application - guaranteeing compatibility
Isolation
Virtual machines are completely isolated from the host machine and other virtual machines. If a virtual machine crashes, all others are unaffected
Data does not leak across virtual machines and applications can only communicate over configured network connections

9. Our Business Case and Analysis
Measures to evaluate our technology services
Cost
Manageability – does it fit our knowledge, skills and environment
Direct cost of HW/SW
Ongoing support costs
R & R
How Responsive are we to new customer requests
How Reliable is the service we provide

10. Issues we faced. Servers get old…. Expanding need for services
Hardware failure:
Days or weeks to purchase, install, configure new server.
Interruption of service.
No “spare” server available to bring into service on failure…
Expanding need for services
Number of servers has grown from 4 to 7 since 2003….not including test and dev systems.
Non-efficient use of resources:
Server CPU utilization is low: 5-8% per server.
Software often does not play nice….
Applications work best when isolated.
Easier to troubleshoot problems when isolated.

11. Performance chart…
Typical server deployments achieve an average utilization of only 10% to 15% of total capacity, according to International Data Corporation (IDC), a market research firm.

12. Why did we make the change?
Video server crashed
How long will it take to buy, build, install and configure a new video server?
Easy to bring services up on existing virtual server.
Once we saw that it worked fine, no reason to go back.
Testing on original physical server showed a peak streaming capacity of ~300 users…
Testing on new virtual server showed a capacity of ~250 users.

13. Network Performance of VM’s
90% of native performance for networking
Source: vmware.com/files/pdf/multi_vm_network_performance.html

14. What we learned
Near native performance was more than enough to meet our day to day requirements.
Virtualization allows us much more flexibility and capabilities.
Failover to another host.
Clone VM to new instance.
Snapshot system when making changes to allow rollback.

15. The future…. New systems are provisioned as virtual machines.
Typically new systems can be up and running in 2-4 hours from the request time.
Pilots being run on virtualizing end user desktops.
Regular replacement, maintenance, and upgrades will be performed with near zero downtime.
Applications that can be provided as VM’s have clear advantage for deployment.

16. Review
Virtualization allows you to build flexibility into your IT environment.
Backup and Recovery, Provisioning, Software testing and validation.
Applications do not even know that they are running in a virtualized OS.
Behavior is exactly as they would on physical box.
Resource allocation means you can give it exactly as much as it needs and no more.
Vmware ESX does not have capability to allocate bandwidth!
Requires new skills and knowledge to setup and maintain.

17. Questions?