Virtualisation

...and once you turn it on you have a gale force warning sign to put round the back and I know its not as bad as a normal rack server but when full cabled you still have enough cable to sink a battleship or 2.
 
Absolutely, we filled out demo rack up and had to switch it all on in stages so as not to trip the circuits. But our room is not a proper server room, it is just a customer demo rack with a load of blades, SAN and and Backup equipment..

However if you use the management software properly you can get it down to about gale force 1. With regards to cables are you using switching or pass throughs, as switching should reduce your cabling by up to about 90%:)
 
We had a fully populated c-class with with 4 x pass thru ethernet as we had some interesting configurations and costs to deal with, was also not helped by the fibre as well
 
Origin said:


There you go. Loaded with Interconnects and Onboard Admin modules :)
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Ooohh looks purdy. One of these days I'll convince a company to buy them and then just figure out the rest from there :) Next time I get to work for a small company who don't want loads of racks of stuff, thats my plan.
 
J1nxy said:
We had a fully populated c-class with with 4 x pass thru ethernet as we had some interesting configurations and costs to deal with, was also not helped by the fibre as well
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Well yes if you use pass through, seems kind of odd not to take the oppurtunity to use the build in switch bays...
 
when we already had a fully switched and configured network and the costs of each bay was over 2K compared to the cost of the pass thrus we had no choice, it was a budget issue not technology.
 
We've used blades and 380's etc. Currently moving to ML570's as we got a good deal on a few of them (quad core, 64GB ram, HDS SAN). Previously running approximately 50 ESX hosts, consolidating down to the ML570's and a few blades.

The_Cicco: Unless I'm mistaken NFS is horrendous for ESX due to the amount of data it has to read. Might be worth some more research before final config, I could be wrong though. /Edit: Just being doing some more reading, some say good, some say bad. There's an interesting post here http://storagefoo.blogspot.com/2007/09/vmware-over-nfs.html If you read the comments further down, VMWare recommend not putting your VM's swap file on NFS so it looks like I may be wrong but my instructor seemed pretty clued up.

The blades are good however personal experience isn't amazing with them. Had 2 enclosures fail simultaneously which would create quite a hit if you were running them at a decent utilisation.

HyperV is still a way off yet, for true production usage I wouldn't stray from ESX. Given a year to 18 months I think MS will make great progress, however its still a way off in terms of features, proven stability etc.

Microsoft have recently virtualised MSDN and Technet webservers and written a paper, there is quite an overheard with HyperV....


Bigredshark: I think we also struggled with the blades only having 4 NICS max, pretty sure we needed 6 for a lot of things hence requiring "big" boxes.

Best of luck, its very cool once you have it in and working. Being able to Vmotion servers on the fly is pretty handy.
 
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J1nxy said:
when we already had a fully switched and configured network and the costs of each bay was over 2K compared to the cost of the pass thrus we had no choice, it was a budget issue not technology.
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Thats true, the cisco switches for the blade centers are especially expensive, fortunately I don't really have budget concerns to worry about.
 
we're running good old ubuntu + vmware server, tied together with virtual centre for our production environment. Currently only running odds & sods, WSUS, Intranet, Thin Client Management software etc, Found it useful to enable us to turn off some old boxes, without trying to work out what they were doing first; just used the pc -> vm converter and voilla.
(Can you tell that this place is a mess? :p)

Current test box; a nice 2950 Dell; 2 Quads, 32gb Ram, 6 local disks is running Xenserver; which Im actually getting on quite well with. Not sure if its quite production material; but then its about the same price as our existing setup was; and includes their vmotion equivalent etc.

There's currently talk of setting up our new exchange installation on Xen; backed on to our Netapp 3020; which will certainly be an interesting one; I think it needs a bit more thought though as I said above not sure Xen is quite ready for mission critical stuff.
 
I'm looking into this for DR reasons - We use Backup Exec 11D so I know all the servers are backed up correctly but its restoring them into a VM area now.

Anyone else use VM for DR?
 
Well our backup solution is UltraBac 8.2.2 and I bought it on the strength of its ability to do bare metal backup/recovery and P2V, V2P, and P2P !

Some people use it to do the P2V when converting from a physical to virtual infrastructure its that good.

Pricey but worth it.

So whats the performance like in HyperV Over Clocker?
 
Does anyone have the gospel set in stone TRUTH about MS licensing and virtualisation.

Because the latest i've heard is that MS want you to licence for the physical servers. Meaning that if you have a Windows 2003 VM, and a DRS / HA cluster of ten hosts that it *may* run on you need to have 10 licences for Windows 2003, this is on select corp licencing.

I've also heard about 3 different version of the truth as well.
 
Stolly said:
Does anyone have the gospel set in stone TRUTH about MS licensing and virtualisation.

Because the latest i've heard is that MS want you to licence for the physical servers. Meaning that if you have a Windows 2003 VM, and a DRS / HA cluster of ten hosts that it *may* run on you need to have 10 licences for Windows 2003, this is on select corp licencing.

I've also heard about 3 different version of the truth as well.
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From what I can tell on the Microsoft website, it works as follows:

Windows Server 2003 Standard - 1 license per virtual server
Windows Server 2003 Enterprise - 1 license per 4 virtual servers
Windows Server 2003 Datacentre - 1 license covers all virtual servers

The above is based on using per processor licenses as well. So if you have a server with 2 physical processors, you can buy 2 copies of datacentre edition and be fully licensed for windows on that box.

Information from Microsoft is HERE

EDIT:

Found the real link I was looking for Microsoft Licensing Calculator
 
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TheKnat said:
From what I can tell on the Microsoft website, it works as follows:

Windows Server 2003 Standard - 1 license per virtual server
Windows Server 2003 Enterprise - 1 license per 4 virtual servers
Windows Server 2003 Datacentre - 1 license covers all virtual servers

The above is based on using per processor licenses as well. So if you have a server with 2 physical processors, you can buy 2 copies of datacentre edition and be fully licensed for windows on that box.

Information from Microsoft is HERE

EDIT:

Found the real link I was looking for Microsoft Licensing Calculator
Click to expand...

Nice one, thats just what i was looking for.
 
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