Posts tagged VMware
A storage cluster is born
May 19th
It is time to add space to our VMware cluster for storage of VMs for our customers.
We started initially using Compellent SAN storage. Worked well, had a lot of space, but the performance was not what I was looking for (it is all SATA based), using F/C is far more complicated than we need for this project, and just plain expensive to upgrade (adding a shelf of 16 450GB SAS disks is more expensive than the solution presented here).
Spin forward a few months, I took one of our older NetApp FAS270c systems and ripped out the 73GB 10K disks, went to eBay and purchased 2 shelves of 300GB 10K F/C disks and after an afternoon of shuffling we had ourselves a cluster for storage. Performance is absolutely great (and predictable). Expanding it? Expensive, just like the Compellent, and I also wanted to investigate some of the new things that can be done with storage, like inline (and synchronous) compression and data deduplication.
History lesson: Years and years ago I did a lot with Solaris and I have kept my feet wet playing with OpenSolaris and ZFS. I won’t bore you with the great details of why ZFS is the shit (links at the bottom of the post) or why Solaris needs to live on forever (because no one can thread at the kernel level like Solaris), but I will tell you that using Solaris (or OpenSolaris) with ZFS is a combination that is very tough to beat. So last year I used the Sun Try-and-Buy program to test out a 7110 and I absolutely loved the interface, and the price drop that occurred while I had it! But someone within Sun decided that no, as a TaB customer the new pricing is not available. I was floored by this. I shipped back the 7110, and anyway, I really wanted a cluster, not a single head, single JBOD enclosure.
In the end I wanted a cluster!
That’s 2 heads, automatic failover, etherchannel/trunk/IPMP/LACP oh hell, I just wanted multiple ethernets bound together if possible, basic reporting (I can SNMP for the real stuff), and finally, a price tag that I can feel good about for storage of our customer data.
This is where NexentaStor comes in! They have the pieces all put together so I don’t have to self-engineer something. I have a vendor I can harass or ask questions of. I can focus on what makes my business work instead of working to make my business stable.
Example cost: Virtual Private Cloud (updated)
Feb 10th
Back in September, 2009, I had written a post with a quick overview of what a private cloud (or infrastructure) looks like and some basic costs and information, including why it is a great product (I am biased).
Since then, Dell has retired the PE2900III model server and items change, this is an update for the basic configuration.
Reminder graphic:
2 Servers, 1 firewall
So, originally, the physical servers were configured as:
- Dell PE2900III (reasonably priced, very reliable, I have spares on the shelf)
- 4 ethernet ports (2 built in, 2 port card installed, more can be added)
- 2 73GB SAS drives mirrored together for booting VMware vSphere 4
- 32GB RAM (48GB is max for this hardware platform)
New servers look like:
- Dell PET610 (reasonable price, very reliable, spares to go onto the shelf)
- 4 ethernet ports (all built in)
- 2 80GB SATA drives mirrored together for booting VMware vSphere 4
- 48GB RAM (192GB max available – very expensive)
The reason for the RAM change is that I am seeing a 2:1 (or higher) ratio of RAM to CPU usage in terms of percentage, and 48GB is a good place for this sized system. Also, the newer Xeon 55xx series processors uses RAM sticks in 3s instead of 2 or 4 at a time. 48GB is 12 4GB sticks of RAM. The newer 55xx series of processors also has working hyper-threading (or H/T) and I am seeing very nice performance on servers deployed using this processor family in our network.
Cost difference? The original posting listed had estimated the cost at $1,600.00 per month (see previous post), and I estimate this to be very close, inching up to approximately $1,700.00 per month, and this number should be high. (for accurate pricing, please contact ipHouse sales people, they can run up a quote based on real numbers)
Shell service available
Jan 29th
Been a long week and I had to deal with some red tape internally (of my own creation!), but finally have some working shell service to sell to people who want it.
I had posted last week about the issue(s) of shell services and decided that I would do the work to put this kind of service together as I have both the experience and gumption to do so. Even includes my smiley, happy-go-lucky support attitude!
So it is available and sales is ready to take the orders. I don’t expect a lot of people signing up for this, but it takes care of a sect of customers that still want to do things in a manner that isn’t web based, that isn’t all mouse driven.
I can relate to that!
- Ubuntu Hardy
- FreeBSD 8
- emacs, vi, joe
- mutt (no elm, no pine – all Maildir oh well)
- procmail filtering
- IMAP, POP3, SMTP, with SSL and STARTTLS goodness
- reasonable and ample disk storage quota on our NetApp gear
Let the nerding begin!
VMware releases vSphere 4.0 Update 1
Nov 20th
The crowd cheers!
Though that might just be me :)
I am very excited for this update and I hope that it goes as smoothly as other updates have gone.
I have already updated 2 non-production systems (both ESX) and I am in the process of updating some non-production ESXi servers.
One of the items I need to schedule is the update of the vCenter software – this will require an actual outage for customers who are managing their VMs through ipHouse.
I hope that this update fixes 2 problems I have seen in the past (from the vSphere Client point of view):
- Inability for a datacenter administrator to view or clear host alerts and alarms from the hardware
- Interesting permissions issues that end up being more restrictive than the topic states
Both of these have been difficult to work around.
The first one requires the customer to contact us to ‘reset’ their hardware sensors.
The second one has actually hampered one customer from controlling their VMware cluster because of issues dealing with datastore management and the ability to attach an ISO image to their newly created VMs.
One item that is really exciting is the raising of the number of vCPUs (virtual CPUs) per physical CPU core to 25 per. Since we are able to sell VMware based virtual servers to customers, the ability to scale this higher could mean higher savings long term. Be nice to update pricing to reflect these savings later as well, though don’t know if there will be enough right now. At this point we really aren’t reaching the previous limit of 20 vCPU per pCPU.
Added support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008R2 is also welcome as we were wanting to deploy this version of Windows for customers.
Full release notes can be found here and are worth reading if you are into the enterprise products from VMware.
Related articles by Zemanta
- VMware boasts a half mil vSphere downloads (theregister.co.uk)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=fdcb7eed-284b-426e-a61b-8138e593b7f6)
Example cost: Virtual Private Cloud on VMware
Sep 4th
In the last 6 months, I have helped multiple customers achieve their dream of a virtual machine environment built for them exclusively, but with abilities to control their virtual machine setup, configuration, turn up, tear down, etc. These dedicated infrastructure environments are in the ipHouse data center.
This isn’t ‘cloud computing’ as many people think of it (thanks to Amazon EC2 and the like), but it is pretty close to that vague definition, and with far more control available in terms of everything-vm-wise.
What do I mean? With this virtual private cloud, a customer can set up 3 Ubuntu systems, 2 Windows Server 2003, 1 FreeBSD, and 7 Windows Server 2008 systems. There really isn’t anything novel about this (again, reference Amazon EC2 and the like).
What is novel is that the customer can configure these VMs as they wish. Disk space allocation, partitioning, memory configurations, number of vCPUs. Basically, if you can do it on a physical server – you can do it virtually.
Another differentiating feature is that VMware vSphere 4 supports many operating systems while most public cloud providers offer a very limited number in comparison. This choice alone can be enough to warrant looking at this kind of solution.
No per hour fees, no storage fees (above what the customer has purchased), highly available (if configured to do so), dynamic resource scheduling (if configured to do so), bandwidth fees that are predictable. (see VMare vMotion and Storage vMotion, VMware HA, VMware DRS via website)
I’ll build a configuration example offering shared storage between the VMware physical servers. I’ll be doing some cost estimates for the per month fees. These estimates will be high and are purely shown for example. You would want to contact ipHouse Sales to get a real idea for the costs involved.
