Virtualisation

Our company DR falls on me so I need to get it right - I've gone back to Server 2003 and VS2005 and using Backup Exec 11D.

So I should be able to report tomorrow if I can get a live production server restored into VS state using Backup Execs IDR.
 
We've successfully tested restores from Commvault onto ESX. Required a bit of work initially but now its smooth so it should be doable. Normally the main issue will be having enough storage online / quick enough ship in contract...
 
Dangerous said:
Our company DR falls on me so I need to get it right - I've gone back to Server 2003 and VS2005 and using Backup Exec 11D.

So I should be able to report tomorrow if I can get a live production server restored into VS state using Backup Execs IDR.
Click to expand...

How many boxes are you looking to deal with and whats the SLA as there might be better ways of doing it.
 
Dangerous said:
Our company DR falls on me so I need to get it right - I've gone back to Server 2003 and VS2005 and using Backup Exec 11D.

So I should be able to report tomorrow if I can get a live production server restored into VS state using Backup Execs IDR.
Click to expand...

I'm not the DR person at my place but I know we use Backup Exec and also live state recovery for stuff. Got images of all our servers on the san so if one goes belly up it can in theory be recovered pretty quickly from the livestate image.
 
Just to butt in on the Virtualisation gig.

I want to virtualise 7 physical servers onto 1 box with another box for redundancy (and migration of images using vmotion and HA).

The consultant I spoke to (and indeed the consensus from these forums) is for shared storage to facilitate the features I need.

I'm pretty set on VMWare too as a solution. So how does this sound to the OCUK collective wisdom:

2 x Proliant DL380 (Quad core 3Ghz x2 processors) 20Gb RAM, 2x72Gb SAS disk.
NetApp Storevault E300 with 3.5Tb useable (SATA based)
VMWARE VI3 ENTERPRISE FOR 2 CPUS; ADDITIVE LICS INC ESX SERVER 3, VC AGENT, VIRTUAL SMP, VMFS,
VMWARE PLATINUM SUPPT/SUBS FOR VI3 ENT FOR 2 CPUS 24/7 TELEPHONE SUPPORT FOR 1 YEAR
VMWARE VMWARE INFRASTRUCTURE MEDIA KIT (ENGLISH)


The servers currently run on P3 hardware and even on those are not fully utilised (40 staff, 40 client machines in total). Services to be virtualised are Exchange 2003, WSUS and EPO, Intranet and ASP Apps server, 2 DC's with Certificate services and IAS, File and print server, Engineering maintenance database server (already virtual). We use about 190Gb of total live data storage.


I'm also interested in virtualising our business system MFG/PRO which runs on HP-UX and a progress database. The server is ancient, costs a fortune to put on maintenance contract and has a green screen text based UI :( ) Can VMWare P2V HP UX?


thanks
 
a good place to start is with a piece of software called power recon.

You can plonk it on a server and set it to look at your estate (or the portion of it you want to VM) it can then work our your hardware requirements or even do the physical to VM conversion for you.

We used it and VMwares own as part of our sizing exercise.

you will also need Virtual Infrastructure manager licence if you want to monitor each ESX box centrally.
 
tbz_ck said:
Just to butt in on the Virtualisation gig.

I want to virtualise 7 physical servers onto 1 box with another box for redundancy (and migration of images using vmotion and HA).

The consultant I spoke to (and indeed the consensus from these forums) is for shared storage to facilitate the features I need.

I'm pretty set on VMWare too as a solution. So how does this sound to the OCUK collective wisdom:

2 x Proliant DL380 (Quad core 3Ghz x2 processors) 20Gb RAM, 2x72Gb SAS disk.
NetApp Storevault E300 with 3.5Tb useable (SATA based)
VMWARE VI3 ENTERPRISE FOR 2 CPUS; ADDITIVE LICS INC ESX SERVER 3, VC AGENT, VIRTUAL SMP, VMFS,
VMWARE PLATINUM SUPPT/SUBS FOR VI3 ENT FOR 2 CPUS 24/7 TELEPHONE SUPPORT FOR 1 YEAR
VMWARE VMWARE INFRASTRUCTURE MEDIA KIT (ENGLISH)


The servers currently run on P3 hardware and even on those are not fully utilised (40 staff, 40 client machines in total). Services to be virtualised are Exchange 2003, WSUS and EPO, Intranet and ASP Apps server, 2 DC's with Certificate services and IAS, File and print server, Engineering maintenance database server (already virtual). We use about 190Gb of total live data storage.


I'm also interested in virtualising our business system MFG/PRO which runs on HP-UX and a progress database. The server is ancient, costs a fortune to put on maintenance contract and has a green screen text based UI :( ) Can VMWare P2V HP UX?


thanks
Click to expand...


Don't see the virtual center licence there.

You need a physical to run the VMware licence server (or at least a VM thats not part of that cluster)

You can't p2v HP-UX. Not the OS thats the problem as such but HP-UX runs on PA/RISC CPU's and VMware is x86 only.
 
tbz_ck said:
Just to butt in on the Virtualisation gig.

I want to virtualise 7 physical servers onto 1 box with another box for redundancy (and migration of images using vmotion and HA).

The consultant I spoke to (and indeed the consensus from these forums) is for shared storage to facilitate the features I need.

I'm pretty set on VMWare too as a solution. So how does this sound to the OCUK collective wisdom:

2 x Proliant DL380 (Quad core 3Ghz x2 processors) 20Gb RAM, 2x72Gb SAS disk.
NetApp Storevault E300 with 3.5Tb useable (SATA based)
VMWARE VI3 ENTERPRISE FOR 2 CPUS; ADDITIVE LICS INC ESX SERVER 3, VC AGENT, VIRTUAL SMP, VMFS,
VMWARE PLATINUM SUPPT/SUBS FOR VI3 ENT FOR 2 CPUS 24/7 TELEPHONE SUPPORT FOR 1 YEAR
VMWARE VMWARE INFRASTRUCTURE MEDIA KIT (ENGLISH)


The servers currently run on P3 hardware and even on those are not fully utilised (40 staff, 40 client machines in total). Services to be virtualised are Exchange 2003, WSUS and EPO, Intranet and ASP Apps server, 2 DC's with Certificate services and IAS, File and print server, Engineering maintenance database server (already virtual). We use about 190Gb of total live data storage.


I'm also interested in virtualising our business system MFG/PRO which runs on HP-UX and a progress database. The server is ancient, costs a fortune to put on maintenance contract and has a green screen text based UI :( ) Can VMWare P2V HP UX?


thanks
Click to expand...

I guess from what you've put in your spec your intending to go iSCSI for the storaget? If so then you'll need to ensure your have sufficient NICs to provide for production (2 per box teamed), VMKernel and Vmotion (1 shared in this case as your not talking a lot of boxes) and then for iSCSI (2 teamed)

What you will also want is to ahve the iSCSI running over a dedicated network or VLAN to ensure its not impacted by or impacting the production side of the network.

Storage make sure you get a load of disks rather than a few big ones as you want disk I/O throughput. Personally if I had the option I would not use SATA in a production system, but if I had to then i'd rather use 10 x 250 than say 5 x 500.

Don't forget backups. Normal file agents slaughter the performance of virtual hosts but if you can run them out of hours and have a big enough window then go for it. I'd also suggest you look at something like Veeam for the backups as then you have the option of restoring entire VM's rather than having to do a normal restore. Veeam also does incremental and file level restores, beta of v2 is due next week...

Stolly said:
Don't see the virtual center licence there.

You need a physical to run the VMware licence server (or at least a VM thats not part of that cluster)
Click to expand...

You will need also a Virtual Center License and the support for it, but this can be a Virtual Machine, it doesn't need to be physical. The license server can also be a virtual machine as well.

HA runs independently of VC so if you set it up right the box will be the 1st one up if the primary hardware fails.
 
Stolly said:
Don't see the virtual center licence there.

You need a physical to run the VMware licence server (or at least a VM thats not part of that cluster)

You can't p2v HP-UX. Not the OS thats the problem as such but HP-UX runs on PA/RISC CPU's and VMware is x86 only.
Click to expand...

I have another 2 servers that are staying physical in order to support ISA 2004 and RSA SecurID. One of those could have the VMWare license server on it.

Shame about HP-UX, I'm really keen to rid myself of that box.....
 
J1nxy said:
I guess from what you've put in your spec your intending to go iSCSI for the storaget? If so then you'll need to ensure your have sufficient NICs to provide for production (2 per box teamed), VMKernel and Vmotion (1 shared in this case as your not talking a lot of boxes) and then for iSCSI (2 teamed)

What you will also want is to ahve the iSCSI running over a dedicated network or VLAN to ensure its not impacted by or impacting the production side of the network.

Storage make sure you get a load of disks rather than a few big ones as you want disk I/O throughput. Personally if I had the option I would not use SATA in a production system, but if I had to then i'd rather use 10 x 250 than say 5 x 500.

Don't forget backups. Normal file agents slaughter the performance of virtual hosts but if you can run them out of hours and have a big enough window then go for it. I'd also suggest you look at something like Veeam for the backups as then you have the option of restoring entire VM's rather than having to do a normal restore. Veeam also does incremental and file level restores, beta of v2 is due next week...



You will need also a Virtual Center License and the support for it, but this can be a Virtual Machine, it doesn't need to be physical. The license server can also be a virtual machine as well.

HA runs independently of VC so if you set it up right the box will be the 1st one up if the primary hardware fails.
Click to expand...

Yeah the ISCSI route is the way I'm leaning. We have a brand new network based on HP 2900-48G gigabit and I have voice and data vlan's. Our network utilisation is probably only a couple of percent so I don't see it having a dramatic effect upon user perceived network speeds. The Storevault has 2 NIC's in it, and the DL380 has two as well (IIRC). If not I have spare Intel cards that can go in to multi-home the hosts.

The Storevault we are looking at has space for 8 disks. I'm intending on packing them with 500GB SATA drives. Again, let me re-iterate that utilisation on our network is small (CPU, DISK IO, and Network) so I don't think SATA DISK performance will be much of an issue on our network. The main thrust of this project is server consolidation, High availability and resiliency and flexibility of environment.

Regarding backup/restore we already have Ultrabac which is capable of backing up and restoring VM's and bare metal hosts. That should be covered adequately. In addition the storevault comes with the ability to backup via snapshot technology anyhow so definately between the two we should be more than adequately covered for backup/restore and disaster recovery.

Thanks for the advice folks.

I'm trying to set up a meeting at a demo site to have a play and see the technology in action before we commit to it.
 
bigredshark said:
We're currently struggling with power at our datacenters, problem is a full bladecenter can draw something like 40A according to HP and we're considing 3 per cabinet for 120A possible power draw, thats more than we've allowed for 4 racks traditionally so there are going to be lots of empty footprints...
Click to expand...
The problem isnt that it draws 40A. The problem is that the initial draw is usually quite a bit higher than normal operation and the isolator will cut out.
Fixed on our site by ensuring all parts of the power supply can do 32A at all times.
:).
 
Well, so far I have setup a computer to test the water with Hyper-V.

Xeon 3350 - 2.66Ghz
Intel DQ35JO Motherboard
8Gb PC6400 DDR2 Memory
320Gb Western Digital SATA2 HDD for Windows Server 2008 Std w/Hyper-V
2x 750Gb Western Digital SATA2 HDD in RAID1 for Guests

Not the fastest thing in the world, but for a £600 test bed its OK.

Was looking into the best ways of integrating the backup of the guests into our current NetBackup architecture but it doesn't look like there is an agent yet.

What are other people doing regards backup?
 
For Hyper-v at the moment I'd guess your best bet will be to either stick a normal windows agent inside the VM or stop the vm backup it up using a agent on the 2008 OS and then restart.
 
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