3A: Virtualization: Setting the Scene for full Production.

[Mark Smith]

Welcome everyone to Session 3A!  Our time together will allow us to share our experiences as we have moved towards a virtual environment.  If you have not yet begun the move, this session will help to clarify a proven path for testing and evaluating different virtual platforms.

During the session we should touch on the following topics.  These topics are only guidelines to facilitate the discussion during the session so please bring any additional topics of discussion to the session.  The more topics there are, the better the discussion!

• Most popular platforms - Microsoft, VMware, Citrix, etc.
• Network preparations
• Virtualization basics - hypervisors
• Host storage vs. Network storage
• Backing up the Virtual Machines on the hosts
• Backing up application data
• Test environments
• Recovering from a disaster

[Mark Smith]

Hi Everyone,

Thank you for attending my session at the AIMS Technology Retreat.  Below are the session notes.  See you all soon...

Popular Virtual Platforms

-VMWare
-Microsoft
-Citrix
-Linux

Network Preparations
Two network types that every network contains:
Administrative - Administrative access to the network limited to certain ports on the network infrastructure
Core Use - Ordinary user access to the network, full access to non-administrative network services

Three network types that begin to matter when considering Virtualization:
Storage Network
Failover Networks -
1) VMotion, move network load to another server
2) Disaster recovery, network two sites and replicate in real time
3) Test network, sandbox server environments for things like updating

Hypervisors
Comprises the translation layer between hard drive and OS
Installed on the baremetal box

Embedded
Flashed onto non-volatile memory by the manufacturer
Non-Embedded
Install to Host Drive
Install to USB drive
After booting to the drive, then manage server through web interface

Host vs. Network Storage
Host - the hard drives/storage that contain the VMs are in the same physical machine that run the Hypervisor
Network - the VMs are stored independent of the hypervisor machine and remain available to backup

Backup of VMs on Host
There are a lot of free non-integrated utilities written for VMware environments that do what you normally have to buy licenses for
e.g. Backup via SSH, albeit limited by the backup speed
Also paid backup utilities
Some VMware licenses come with this capability
Veritas is an example of third-party software that can do this with added advanced de-duplication capabilities

Pitfalls
The network has to be configured properly to begin with

Disaster Recovery

Virtual Desktops

Virtualization replaces the dependency on the type of machine that it runs
"Independent Layering" - Provides a common platform that abstracts the operating system from the hardware layer

Tools
OpenFiler - makes anything into iSCSI or SAN