Building a cubicle, no matter what the instructions say, is not exactly trivial. Even after putting the walls together, trying to get them all even and lined up is a trick. Then putting up the desk supports and the desk surfaces themselves, which are usually massive slabs of particle board and plastic veneer. If they’re fastened with screws, it’s always from beneath, out of the light, where you’re certain to get wood dust in your face.

In stark contrast, using vCloud Director to build a virtual machine was easy. Login, select a hardware and OS template, optionally configure, and deploy. It was up and running in a few minutes, maybe a little longer if you have added software or network configuration requirements. It’s all done with a keyboard and mouse, and I’m pretty certain I’ve never gotten wood dust in my face from it.

In both cases, a little planning goes a long way. Making a map of your cubicle layout lets you know whether everything is going to fit, what you’ll need, and whether you have it. Updating your map when you change your mind is also important. Making a map of your systems and network is similarly illuminating. How much CPU, memory, and disk do you need? What systems need outside IP addresses?

Also, paying attention to the details pays off. It’s a lot easier to make the desks level if all the supports are attached at the same height. Double check your IP address assignments and DNS records.

Finally, building a virtual machine doesn’t involve any power tools. Well, let’s hope not.

Setting up a monitoring agent on your local network is easy. The server hosting the agent just needs a JRE (Java Runtime Environment) installed using version 1.6 or greater and must be able to make an outgoing SSL connection. To monitor Windows systems, you’ll need to install the agent on a Windows server.

Login to the LogicMonitor website, click on the “Settings” tab, then on “Agents” in the left navigation, then on the “Add” button. Click past the introduction, and indicate whether you’ll be installing the LogicMonitor agent on a Windows or Linux server. Download the agent installer, or copy the link and use wget to download the installer directly to your Linux system. Run the installer to install the agent on your server then return to your web browser and click “Next” to verify that its been installed correctly and is able to communicate with the LogicMonitor system.

To begin monitoring a host on your network, click on the “Hosts” tab, then on the “Add Hosts” button and select “New Host (wizard)”. Enter the host name or IP address. Note that if your monitoring agent and host are on a private internal network then this should be the IP address visible to your agent. Select your monitoring agent (if you have more than 1), and LogicMonitor will go ahead and verify that its able to gather information about the host.

NOTE: at this time, LogicMonitor does not support IPv6

my first test is 10,000 requests for a static HTML page (2866 bytes). this test was run against a single apache server in the pool and against each of software load balancers with two back-end servers, from one source and from three simultaneously.

the single apache server actually performed the best, easily beating any of the software load balancers in raw throughput. the test from three sources is effectively a mild denial-of-service attack, and none of the software load balancers could handle it. each of them failed and stopped accepting connections well before 10,000 requests were completed.

the second test is 20 requests for a PHP script which performs exactly 1 second of mathematics then returns results. in this case, almost all the load is on the back-end servers, and there was negligible difference in results between the four front-ends.

the third test is 400 requests for the PHP script, but issuing 20 concurrent requests from each source at a time. this generates significant load on the back-end servers, but is the first test where having multiple back-ends shows any improvement.

the fourth test is a monster, 400 requests for the PHP script, 100 concurrent requests from each source at a time.

these results suggest that a software load balancer might be an option for putting more capacity and resilience into a script-heavy website, but clearly shouldn’t be chosen for performance. the single apache server performed better than my small cluster in nearly every test, and much better in a few cases. the total meltdown of the software load balancers in difficult situations is of particular concern. the results for the cluster might improve with more back-end servers, but the software load balancer itself seems to be the bottleneck.

of the three software load balancers, the simpler Balance and Pen outperformed Crossroads in general. interestingly, Balance fared spectacularly poorly against heavy traffic in the first test, but very well against a different sort of heavy traffic in the fourth.

one of the simplest forms of load balancing is round-robin DNS, where a single hostname is pointed at multiple IP addresses, each of an individual server. this is very easy to set up, but changes to the pool are limited by DNS caching and TTL. on the other end of the spectrum are dedicated hardware load balancers, such as the F5 Big-IP we use, which monitor the status of each server in the pool and intelligently route incoming requests. these are awesome machines, but come with equally awesome price tags. between these two extremes lie some network firewalls with load balancing, and software load balancers, which run on a front-end server.

i’ve been looking at a few software load balancers for a small virtual server project; Balance, Crossroads, and Pen.

Balance looks interesting, and supports either round-robin or sticky load balancing, and failover. it also supports IPv6 on the listening side, which might be useful if you have to bridge IPv6 into a pool of IPv4 servers. unfortunately, the Ubuntu package is an old version which i was unable to get working properly, and i had to compile from source instead.

what’s sticky load balancing? directing requests from a particular client to the same back-end server, when possible. this is useful for applications that need to support state or session information between requests.

what’s failover? if none of the servers in the regular pool are available, requests are directed to a backup server. the backup server is usually only intended to return a friendly ‘site down’ page.

Crossroads appears to be a fast, multi-threaded, and very capable load balancer. it supports a variety of dispatching algorithms, including several different ways of handling stickiness. although it doesn’t support failover, it does offer options for access control, protection against overloading, and a basic web interface. although the Ubuntu package is an older version, i’m using it because i wasn’t able to get the current version to compile.

Pen is probably the simplest of the three. and although it’s the only one with a current package which installed correctly, its documentation is pretty sketchy. it supports round-robin and sticky load balancing, and has “highly experimental” support for SSL.

Today, organizations need more agility and elasticity in their computing services. Sounds cloudy, huh?

I’m not a fan of the term ‘cloud’, with the vague meanings and weird marketing tricks. We banter around at the office and come up with silly & new terms like ‘fog’ (because it isn’t clear) or ‘to the clown!’ (a play on words in reference to the Microsoft advertisements).

What I am a fan of is the change in operation for how we (all of us) use computing facilities.

Not long ago we were all buying servers for either a single use (front-end web server, a database server, etc) or a larger edition to combine services onto (perhaps a web/database server with email services planned). This is great from the hardware manufacturer point of view but isn’t the best use of the business’ cash flow, creates inflexible hardware configurations, and isn’t very green.

Enter the concept of the virtual data center (or VDC), something we rolled out on October 1st, 2011 after months of testing.

We call the brand ‘vmForge’ and the product ‘Virtual Data Center’ otherwise known as the vmForge VDC.

Companies no longer need to look at everything on a per server basis, many times over configured in one way or another. For example, customer wants to build an IIS web server, Exchange server, and a mailing list server built on a UNIX-like distribution with Mailman. Three different servers would have been purchased based on the requirements. Heading to Dell, we would end up with something like the following (which, BTW, I consider to be mid-sized components, and all rack mounted, and not including any OS licensing):

• $2,980: IIS server, 6 GiB RAM, 1 4-core processor, 4 160 GiB drives in RAID5 with a hot spare
• $4,637: Exchange server, 12 GiB RAM, 2 4-core processors, 6 146 GiB 15K RPM drives in RAID5 with a hot spare
• $2,771: UNIX-like server for Mailman, 6 GiB RAM, 1 4-core processor, 3 160 GiB drives in RAID1 with a hot spare

The above hardware is built on Dell PowerEdge R610, 1U servers with redundant power supplies and is retail pricing with whatever instant savings were available today when I configured them (October 11th, 2011). (RAM laid out in 3 DIMM configurations using 2 GiB DIMMs)

That is a total of $10,388 in capital expenditures. What’s missing? You still need to add in colocation fees per month. And there are wasted resources in each system laid out above.

The IIS server, even with a local database server, probably won’t utilize the full 6 GiB of RAM, and the disk layout is reasonable for disk I/O and redundancy but will have wasted space (most customers/companies won’t put that much stuff up publicly for download). Let’s call it 2 GiB of RAM and 200 GiB of disk space that will go unused.

The Exchange server will be happy with that much RAM and CPU seeing that it will have all roles on one system though the need for 12 GiB is kind of grasping a bit – 10 GiB would be good too but is not a valid configuration on this hardware. The disk layout is built for much higher I/O than the 7200 RPM disks in the other 2 servers but the amount of wasted disk space doubles just to give Exchange the I/O it may require.

The Mailman server is way over configured – it will never use that much CPU, things can run efficiently with 2 or 3 GiB of RAM, and at least 200 GiB of disk will be wasted even if you ran the mailing list server for 10 years with archives.

There has to be a better way…

Enter the vmForge VDC.

Build a data center with all of your resource requirements but now you can say goodbye to over-configuration of resources on a per server basis.

The number of virtual servers you want to use is only limited by the resources you have purchased. The only extra cost per virtual server is OS licensing, if required (looking at you Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 & Red Hat Enterprise Linux).

Build a vmForge VDC with 12Ghz of CPU, 16 GiB of RAM (3, 10, 2 respectfully), and reasonable storage requirements for each server, like so:

• IIS server, 3 GiB of RAM, 2 vCPUs, 120 GiB of storage
• Exchange server, 10 GiB of RAM, 6 vCPUs, 160 GiB of storage
• Mailman server, 2 GiB of RAM, 1 vCPU, 20 GiB of storage

And adjust each server config based on measured usage and make adjustments based on your computing needs and not by what hardware you purchased.

The above would have a cost (no OS licensing fees included) of approximately $425 per month plus bandwidth or transfer. That’s the price of colocation in a half rack with power included! Without CAPEX (or spending your hard earned cash on hardware that will be outdated faster than your financing can pay it off over 3 years).

The vmForge VDC product is powered by VMware vSphere 5, vCloud Director, vShield Edge, and Fortigate firewalls using storage based on NetApp and Nexenta.

Certifiably cooler than colocation…but that’s just my opinion.

ipHouse has never outsourced any type of operations prior to this move. This bold move in efficiency makes ipHouse the premier facility manned and operated 24×7 by a private contractor.

Over the last few months, we have been negotiating with The Wonka Candy Company, directly with president Charlie Bucket for the upgrade to our operations. This might come as surprise to many of you, but Wonka Industries has been branching out for years into other services besides making some mind-blowing, awesome candy. (Though it must be noted, their expansion into day care facilities failed miserably.)

Among the changes to our data center, we will also be upgrading our on-site security measures, our fire suppression solution, and our emergency elevator escape system.

We have also negotiated our new off-site storage with TheCandyMountainSecureStorageServicesCompany(tm) (TCMSSSC). This is great news as it helps us achieve the elusive 5 nines Gobstopper rating for data centers.

Security

The new security measures are sugary sweet, and truly state of the art. We’ll not only be using the Oompa-Loompa workforce for the operations of the data center, but we’ve also contracted with Chocolate Security Services to supply us with their Oompa-Loompa Security Force agents to guard both the front and rear entrances.

We have also initiated changes to our security card system by moving away from easily bypassed proximity cards to Snozzberry Scented Access Cards (SSAC). Digital security systems are easily bypassed because of the single 1s and 0s used in binary computing, the SSAC, though, is purely analog allowing for an infinite combination of scents for authscentification.

Emergency

Our updates to the fire suppression system will be happening during the month of April, 2011 as we move away from the current dry pipe solution to the very first rollout of the Bubble Fire Suppression Solution (BFS) from Bucket Services, Inc. Instead of water (used in dry pipe), Halon (poisonous), or FM200 (where did the air go) uses in the past, the new BFS system actually uses bubbles filled with a secret gas to take the fire up and away from the servers, equipment, and personnel in the facility. Mr. Charlie Bucket says “This is by far, the best system to move fire away from expensive equipment and up into the cutting fans, where the fire will be chopped into smaller, more manageable pieces and mixed into Atomic Fireballs and Big Tex Jelly Beans.”

To handle any impossible emergency events in the data center, the Factory Airation Individual Lift (FAIL) subsidiary will be installing their patented Great Glass Elevator Emergency and Security Cylinders throughout the facility, including both entrances. These can be used by oompa loompas and humans alike to escape an unlikely flood from the new HVAC, which uses hundreds of thousands of gallons of chocolate to remove heat from the data center. They may also be used for security; when a human is determined to be a “bad egg” in the “veruca trap”, they can, and will, be shot into orbit.

Tickets

When customers are coming down to work on their network after these new measures are put into place, a lottery of golden tickets will be used to create some excitement. By working with our customers through multiple – multiple choice questionnaires, we have determined that this will be the most effective way to for their system admins to stop by the data center to patch and update their systems regularly. The winning Golden Tickets Winners (GTW) give the system admins an exclusive 5 minutes alone to wade into, or relax next to, our chocolate waterfall.

While nobody wants to have to come in to fix something broken, this lottery system is designed to add some excitement back into the process.

This is something that has been in the works for some time. If you currently have an access card issued in the past five years, you may already be a winner. Fold your access card LENGTHWISE in half so that the printed side ends up in the middle. You will feel a snap as the card’s contents are revealed.

If your card does not reveal a golden ticket, you are not a winner and will no longer be able to cross the new security perimeter to access your server. You are welcome to try again. Additional access cards are available individually or by the case. Contact your sales representative with any questions or to order.

As an added potential benefit; customers visiting our data center to work on their equipment might win a free candy bar, chocolate coated Windows Server 2008 R2 (the chocolate coating makes it go down easier), apple iPod (tastes like real apples, shaped like a real iPod), or even a full and exclusive tour of our data center by boat.

Finally, with all of these new changes, we will be rolling out a new logo for our Data Security Center Solution Service, seen just below.

Hard Shell Data Center Services

A gallery of pictures of a senior Oompa-Loompa doing an inspection of our current facility is also linked below.

Inverse Investigative Techniques

Reverse Inverse Investigative Techniques

Type Testing of Crash Cart Services

First Test of Upper Rack Security System

Oracle Hands Senior Oompa-Loompa Worker a Wire

Oompa-Loompa on Break

We wish to thank all of the Oompa-Loompas who let us take their photos as we continue to integrate their services into our company.

These parts are: electrical service, backup generator, uninterruptible power supply, automatic transfer switch, power distribution units, power monitoring, and power consumers, such as servers, routers, and switches.

The main difference between power for devices in the datacenter and other types of power service is that a power loss in this situation can be a really big deal. These devices need power that is always on, even in a storm, to function properly. Making the datacenter stay on when the power from the electric company falters takes some special design considerations.

This is how the pieces fit together for our environment:

Normally, all of the power used by the datacenter comes in through one or more electrical services which are either part of the building’s power system, or are dedicated to the datacenter.

This electrical service is pretty reliable, but it can and does fail. Bad weather, natural disasters, human error, road work, and scheduled maintenance can all turn the power off for a time. In some places it is more rare than others to have an electrical outage, but no place is immune. A generator, transfer switch, and uninterruptible power supply (UPS) will keep the datacenter on while the power grid is off.

The UPS is a battery backup for the electrical service. Our datacenter uses a double-conversion, or “online” UPS. Double-conversion means that the AC power coming in from the electrical service is converted to DC power to charge the batteries, and then the DC power from the battery strings is converted back to AC power to power the datacenter. This method has some pros and cons. Since power is always supplied from the DC bus the batteries attach to, defects in the incoming power are smoothed out. During the conversion to DC and back to AC, voltage spikes and dips are corrected.

If the electrical service voltage goes too low or too high for a period of time, the load on the other side of the UPS should never see a change in the power it gets. If the electrical service drops offline for any reason, the UPS keeps providing power from its batteries without any interruption. Which is why it’s called uninterruptible.

Double-conversion comes at a price. Converting the power to and from DC, running the UPS itself, and keeping the batteries charged all take some power. For a typical UPS, this all adds a little more than 10% to the total power that goes through it.

When the electrical service goes out, the batteries power the data center forever, and they are not supposed to. This is where the transfer switch and the generator come into play. The transfer switch really does two jobs. First, it watches the grid power and tells the generator to turn on when there is a problem and to turn back off after the power stabilizes. Second, the transfer switch actually switches the feed that goes to the UPS from grid power to generator power and back when it is time.

When the backup generator gets the signal, it starts up and begins producing electricity. This usually takes a few seconds to a few dozen seconds, depending on the type of generator. Once the generator is running and the power coming from it is stable, the transfer switch connects the UPS to the generator instead of the grid. A while after the grid power comes back on and looks stable to the transfer switch, it connects the UPS back to grid power and tells the generator to shut down.

Also worth mentioning, even though it is not exactly part of the power system is the cooling. Power and cooling go hand-in-hand because all of the power that is consumed in the datacenter turns into heat which must be removed. The size and design of the cooling system is directly related to how much power the systems it will be cooling will use.

Typically, the cooling system is connected to generators, but not to a UPS. The pieces of the cooling system don’t suffer (much) from a power outage of a few seconds the way a server, firewall, or storage system would. It would be inefficient to run that extra power through the UPS when it is not needed. The lights are treated the same way. You’ll get by in the dark for a few seconds while the generator comes online. The servers are more picky.

From the UPS, getting the power to the servers should seem familiar if you are comfortable with how your home electrical service works. Here goes. From the UPS, the power is distributed by PDUs to the individual equipment racks. The PDU is a breaker panel with some additional features. Each rack gets power from one or more electrical circuits,which all connect back to breakers in the PDUs.

In our data center, each PDU also contains a transformer to convert the 480V Wye electrical service to the 120V single-phase circuits we deliver to each rack. Each of these circuits ends in an outlet that one or more rackmount power strips (also called PDUs, thank you very much) plug into. The equipment in the rack plugs into those power strips.

So in short, the transfer switch tells the generator when it is needed and connects the UPS to it when the generator is ready. The UPS smooths out the bumps so that the servers in the datacenter never notice a thing. Of course, every last part of the system is a little more complex than I have outlined here, but that’s how summaries go.

• Your website has tons of extra space added onto it to support the files needed to run the site.
• Your mailbox is continually reaching the upper echelons of storage capacities and frequently needs space upgrades.
• At least one of your thirty plus domains are always up for renewal.

Your bill is starting to resemble a waistline during the holiday season, growing exponentially. There has to be another option, a more cost effective option.

There is… A virtual server (or a virtual data center depending on your needs).

Queue: “Unsolved Mysteries” theme song, Robert Stack‘s voice and a nice blood curdling scream…

It’s not as bad as it sounds. It is actually quite cool. A virtual server gives the user the ability to have a piece or slice of our resources to run a completely private and secure server.

Confused? Think of it like an apartment. The apartment is a building that has units, electricity, and water already supplied to it and ready for use just like our cluster that has storage, RAM, vCPU, power, and bandwidth already allocated to it and ready for use.

Inside of the apartment building you get to choose the size of the unit that you would like — this resembles the virtual machine you need resource wise – storage, vCPU, and RAM. Lastly, after deciding on the unit you get to decide how you would like to furnish it — OS, programs, databases, etc…

*** Warning – bonus geeky stuff – skip ahead if you don’t want to read ***

Bonus -
We can take it one step farther and talk about ipHouse maintaining the server. With ipHouse maintenance, we place the server behind a firewall and do all the patching and OS updates for the system. The firewall would be like having a security guard in front of your apartment unit checking to see who is visiting at all times. The system patching and OS updates would be like having a house keeping service and an interior decorator coming in to clean and renovate once a month!

Extra bonus -
A cool feature of our virtual servers is Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS). DRS  makes your virtual server a top priority for resources if the front end you are on starts to get busy.  Going back to our apartment… if half of the occupants were using  water in their apartments at the same time and you had DRS, you would be sure to have the same water pressure you have when no one is using water.

Extra extra bonus -
My favorite feature of a our virtual server cluster is High Availability, also known as HA. High availability almost instantly restarts the virtual machine if the physical machine it is on in the cluster goes down. The equivalent to this one (I am reaching) would be if there were 2, 3, or more apartment buildings in your complex. If your apartment building was hit by a catastrophic event (water main burst, fire, etc) a team of workers would be instantly deployed to your unit to move your apartment, exactly like it was, into one of the other buildings… the only thing you would have to do after you were moved is turn your TV back on to resume watching the show that was on.

*** End of bonus geeky stuff ***

Moving from web hosting packages to a virtual server is cost effective for quite a few reasons –

• Going with a virtual server option means mail, web hosting, and DNS hosting can all happen on the server, which means that all of these costs will be removed from your current hosting situation.
• A virtual server will have scaleable storage space, most likely substantially more than the storage space allocated to the mailboxes and web hosting package you have.
• Deciding to go with a virtual server removes the issue of having to dish out the capital expense for a $XX,000 server which probably wont have the redundancies in place like a physical server cluster does.
• Lastly, if you need to work on your virtual server you will be able to work on it remotely, instead of having to drive to the data center where it is hosted and using a KVM to work on it.

The real take home message from this post is that if web hosting and mail hosting seem like they are getting too expensive for you there is probably a better solution out there. That solution may very well be a virtual server. We at ipHouse know how to customize servers and know what types of resources are needed to make the transition to a virtual server a swift one with virtually no downtime.

Wait…can we back up a bit?

Once upon a time, not long ago, I was a troubleshooter, a technical support representative. I lived within a predefined world of internet services, but knew it’s rules inside and out. For many reasons, I realized that it was time to jump start my career. I had a few options in front of me. My company was deploying a VMware based virtual infrastructure, and I thought that would be an interesting avenue to explore. I had my heading. I was going to get my VMware Certified Professional Certification and become a VCP.

It took three months of hard work for me to earn my certification. Seemingly overnight I had to go from a basic understanding of things like storage technologies, networking, and server layouts to a more in depth version. I had to know how each piece worked, how to set each up, how to configure them to talk to each other.

I finally had a grasp on the whole picture which allowed me to go from troubleshooter to builder. That’s how Virtualization changed my job, admittedly in a very direct way. However, whether you know it or not, It’s probably going to change your job as well.

You might think it’s a bit presumptuous for me to say that virtualization is going to change  your job. Especially since many of you have no idea what virtualization is. If you don’t know what virtualization is, you might think that, as a virtualization guy, I might see the world through tinted glasses.

Now, in case you don’t know what virtualization is then I’d suggest you read up on it via Wikipedia here. Why you may be looking at moving to virtualization has been addressed elegantly on this blog before. In this post I’m going to take a thousand mile view of virtualization, what it means for the IT industry, and to your industry.

Virtualization is not a new technology, mainframe, aka “big iron” systems have been using it for years. The big change comes from combining commodity servers with virtualization. This is a different way of applying the technology and it bridges the gap between cheaper x86 (64-bit) server technology and enterprise design & implementation techniques. Virtualization is a game changer for the IT industry and demand is only growing.

How does it apply to you?

• Are you a system administrator?
  More than likely you will encounter virtualization in your day-to-day operations. The flexibility and power of having isolated systems combined with the price tag of shared infrastructure is too hard for most companies to resist. You may or may not be building VM clusters, but more than likely you’ll have virtual machines to work on. You’ll have to know how the virtual infrastructure is laid out, how to recognize performance crunches that may or may be in your control, and how to choose the right virtualization provider for your clients or business. If you are working on provisioning VM clusters you may have to become familiar with the concepts of live migration, dynamic resource management, and shared storage I/O and usage patterns. You’ll have to have a good answer for any question that comes up, because everyone will be quick to point the finger at virtualization (check out this recent blog post).
• Do you own or run a small business?
  More than likely, you’re going to have to add IT infrastructure. The flexibility of a well thought out, well designed IT framework can make your business stand out while saving operating capital.  That flexibility can mean investing a significant amount in hardware, find a place to colocate it while paying for it’s upkeep. Or you can virtualize your infrastructure. Simply put, virtualization makes it possible to have shared applications, or a private email server, or a VOIP system without paying for expensive hardware for each service.
• Are you a developer?
  Virtualization is ideal for prototyping, testing and hosting new applications. Set up what you need when you need it, tear it down or add to it dynamically, without buying or selling hardware. Staging is just a matter of adding a few resources for a month or two. Production is just a matter of spinning up more servers. Get a few more users than you anticipated? Add more resources!
• Do you work for a large company?
  More and more of your data will be handled by virtual machines. Virtual desktops or application pools are becoming more and more prevalent, and you’re going to want to be ready for them. Do you have a project that your company’s cumbersome internal processes make impossible to get off the ground? An outsourced virtualization platform may be the answer. Need to test performance from outside your organization? A virtual server might be the ideal setup to complete that task.
• Are you an independant web designer?
  A Virtual Server can allow you to offer web hosting, email hosting and DNS. Now you’ve gone from a content creator to a hosting provider that can offer one-stop shopping for your customers. And you can offload the day to day operating system management to your virtualization provider (if offered).
• Are you in Engineering, Architecture, or Construction?
  Shared workspace virtual machines allow you to work together without moving those large files around. Now you can simply give your employees, partners, and customers access to the same files on the same machine, wherever they are.
• Are you a Startup?
  Virtual servers can save on infrastructure costs allowing you to spend your capital on growing your business. Instead of investing in hardware that will be outdated soon enough, invest in your growth and leverage the scalability of the virtualization providers available. Buying what you need when you need it allows you to have fiscal flexibility during a rocky start.

There are a lot of professions out there and a lot of people. Until recently, a comprehensive IT infrastructure was out of reach for many of them.

The common theme in this push toward virtualization is this; you no longer need to have big purse strings to create something that will be reliable and scalable, and not necessary permanent. You don’t have to worry about hardware cycles, or storage configurations, or planning for three to five years down the road. You can do it yourself, buy what you need, when you need it, and get it fast. And it’s yours. Or not – by using a provider who has already invested in this platform potentially saving you many thousands of up front dollars building it yourself.

Virtualization isn’t coming, it’s here. Sooner or later it’ll affect you, your job and your business. There might be some growing pains but the future is a bright one.

And people like me, a virtualization nerd, IT professionals, we’re here, waiting, ready to help you.

Their current setup had been limited by the physical hardware the application was running on.

They are currently working on updating their software and felt it was time to look into solutions that will allow for the power and scalability they need. The solution needed to be diverse with the option growing both vertically and horizontally when the time comes.

The solution detailed below is the one proposed by ipHouse for them – a solution utilizing our VMware vSphere based server cluster.

The configuration that the company had rolled out was not able to scale with the planned changes in the software, and the growth they hoped to achieve.

A few of the obstacles that were to be overcome are:

• A solution to migrate away from Citrix
• A solution to access local printers from the remote application
• Able to handle multiple users uploading and downloading data concurrently
• A way to keep user sessions private, secure, and separated

How did we propose to resolve these problems?

We replaced Citrix with Windows Remote Desktop Services (RDS). Using RDS makes it easy to attach the clients local printer to their session, as if the printer were there on the server. This allows the client to print their reports to the printer in their office and not have to go and find which printer they thought they were printing to. Using RDS broker services – our client can now scale horizontally by adding more RDS endpoints.

Based on this information provided to us by our potential customer, ipHouse was able to design & build a system that is currently comprised of 3 VMware virtual servers that can scale.

The first virtual server in the cluster is the broker server. This server is responsible for directing traffic to the appropriate Remote Desktop Server over the provided VPN connection. The broker acts as a load balancer to the RDS servers in the cluster directing traffic based on different metrics. The responsibility of the broker is twofold; to divvy up the users between the different RDS servers and to reconnect the users to the proper RDS server when they log back onto an existing session. Currently, the brokering server is only directing traffic to one RDS server though it will be able to direct to multiple Remote Desktop Servers as the cluster starts to scale by adding further RDS servers.

The second virtual server is the RDS server. This server is responsible for the remote desktop connections used to allow the customer’s client to run an instance of the Windows based client software.

The third virtual server is the Microsoft SQL Server and file server. The Windows based client software uses SQL Server to store the data for reporting, and the file server houses the roaming user profiles for the different users Windows RDS sessions.

This setup works well for many reasons:

• Cost Effective: Since ipHouse is a certified VMware Service Provider (VSPP), our client is able to spin up VMware virtual servers on our shared cluster for a fraction of the cost they would be spend to buy new hardware along with VMware vSphere suite.
• Redundant: The ipHouse VMware cluster is comprised of three Dell R905’s as the physical hosts and uses a NAS storage cluster on the backend for storage of the VMware disk images. Having three Dell R905’s gives the cluster redundancy especially when using VMware HA/DRS (more to come on that below). More information on the NAS can be found here.
• Scalability: As a best common practice, we have separated out all of the services onto their own servers. This will allow the server cluster to scale as required by our customer. For instance, if in the future, we find that the Remote Desktop Servers will run more efficiently by adding another into the cluster all we have to do is spin one up and add it into their cluster. As our client adds more clients to this platform we are able to add any of the servers they require to be added. Due to how the broker server works the end user will only see their remote desktop and not worry about how they got there.
• Secure connections: The users will be logging in via VPN; the data transmitted will be encrypted between the user and the servers.
• VMware High Availability and Dynamic Resource Scheduling: HA/DRS gives our customers full leverage of the ipHouse shared VMware server cluster. If one of the Dell R905 front ends happened to go down the HA service will automatically bring the virtual server up onto another one of the front-ends. DRS allows for physical server balancing of resources allowing busy servers to move from a busy host onto a less busy host smoothly and without service interruption.

I am glad that we were able to sit down and work with this customer to create a platform that offers them the level of flexibility and reliability that they need while allowing for growth without a lot of re-engineering.

So far this solution has worked very well.  It has allowed our engineering team to work with Microsoft technologies we have only read about (the broker service in particular) while allowing us to show our customer how it is all put together. This customer has a wish to do their own operating system, user, and application management so being able to sit down and work with them was very beneficial to both of us.