Josh Currier

Technology, by the seat of your pants.

Archive for the ‘Virtualization’ category

Capacity Planning for Virtualization

September 28th, 2009

When I began my journey toward virtualization, it was early and there weren’t many good tools for planning performance capacity. Step 1 started with a single host server with local storage, and after a year of running 14 low-resource servers on the one box, I had the leverage to take a big step up to Step 2.

Step 2 included an EqualLogic PS400E iSCSI SAN, and 4 Dell PowerEdge 1950III servers with VMWare ESX Enterprise, with a Virtual Center Server. Our immediate needs/goals for virtualization were modest, with plans only to virtualize file, application, and mail servers and only 15 to 20 physical servers. Our Oracle and SQL servers already had dedicated platforms and until we break into the realm of a ‘real’ SAN like EMC, I didn’t want to deal with the i/o headaches these systems would cause on our virtual platform. » Read more: Capacity Planning for Virtualization

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Tags: capacity planning

Dell EqualLogic SAN HeadQuarters

September 3rd, 2009

I used our EqualLogic iSCSI SAN for well over a year without any effective way to monitor the array’s performance. We have virtualized over 30 servers, including some fairly high-I/O servers like Lotus Domino, and while the virtual platform usually performs very well it was difficult to see what was going on when a slowdown occured. Enter EqualLogic SAN HeadQuarters.

SAN HeadQuarters installs on an application server and logs information received via SNMP from the EqualLogic Group. Firmware 3.3.3 or newer is required to use this software, and 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008 are supported. For monitoring from your workstation, a client-only installation allows you to view the logged information without accessing the console of the server where you have installed SAN HeadQuarters. » Read more: Dell EqualLogic SAN HeadQuarters

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Posted in Virtualization

Tags: EQL EqualLogic iSCSI

vSphere First Impressions

September 1st, 2009

Chances are if you’re reading this blog, you’re already familiar with virtualization and more specifically, VMWare’s latest offering; vSphere (ESX 4.0). As the nitty gritty details are readily available on the VMWare website, I’ll skip the fluff and give my personal impressions of the features I’ve used so far.

The Upgrade
I started using ESX in 3.0, so this wasn’t my first time movin’ on up to the upper east side, or in this case a newer and better version of VMWare ESX. The upgrade of vCenter server went poorly, having plugin issues and database issues that at the time did not have widely known fixes or workarounds. I don’t care about performance history all that much so I did a full uninstall/reinstall of vCenter, including the database, and all was well. Upgrading the ESX hosts was so easy, I won’t waste much time talking about it. Using upgrade baselines in vCenter I plugged the ESX4 iso in, ran a scan, then individually remediated each of our four hosts in the same manner that I would when installing patches. It was that easy. » Read more: vSphere First Impressions

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Tags: VMWare vsphere

vSphere Resource Allocation – Using Limits

September 1st, 2009

I can think of plenty of scenarios where limits would come in handy, and none of them apply to my implementation (yet) so I’ll spare you my speculative wisdom. I have only one piece of advice regarding this setting, and it’s: DON’T make the mistake of assuming that zero and unlimited mean the same thing, because they don’t.

In summary: zero = the end of the world as you know it, so don’t do it, and especially don’t do it to all of your VMs at once. Trust me on this.

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Tags: VMWare vsphere

Virtualization: best practices for real life.

October 30th, 2008

My whole career has been about having things thrown at me and learning on the fly. This works out pretty well most of the time, especially when it’s a new-to-us technology that’s been around for a while already like Active Directory (which we didn’t start using until Server 2003 was out). With all of the published best-practices and configuration guides that were available by the time we implemented AD, it was practically a walk in the park.

There are times, however, when you’re actually keeping up with the trends in technology and have to deploy something that’s fairly new. I first deployed VMWare ESX Server a few years ago and there weren’t so many configuration options as there are now. It was a standalone server with a lot of local storage, and then all I had to do was manage the resources. Easy! So easy that we got another one to run some automation systems for the Engineering Department. Another success! After successfully reducing our hardware inventory without lowering our availability or system performance index, I convinced the powers-that-be that a full-blown virtualization platform was clearly the next step in our technological evolution. » Read more: Virtualization: best practices for real life.

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Posted in Virtualization

Tags: best practices EQL EqualLogic VMWare

VMWare VI and iSCSI, a match made in…wait, what?

September 18th, 2008

About a year ago I was faced with the reality that we’ll keep needing more servers, and that after 3 years we have to start paying to renew the warranties. Combined with the fact that our resource utilization on most of our servers was lllllooooowwwww, it became pretty obvious that we needed to make a change (we can believe in! lol). The answer to our problems: Virtualization. Duh.

We already had two standalone VMWare ESX servers running production servers and I couldn’t be happier, so the decision to use VMWare as the platform for a large-scale (ok it’s just large-scale to us) virtualization initiative was a no-brainer. We ordered 4 Dell rack servers with ESX 3 Enterprise, and a 7TB EqualLogic PS400E iSCSI SAN, to be connected using Procurve 2810-48 switches on both the network and iSCSI side with separate switches for each. I set it all up and started migrating physical servers into the virtual environment. Abso-freaking-lutely awesome! » Read more: VMWare VI and iSCSI, a match made in…wait, what?