Transcript Avanade: Virtual Server notes from the field

Welcome to the
Microsoft Architect Forum
Part 3
Avanade: Virtual Server
notes from the field
David Miller
Solution Director – Data Centre Optimisation
Infrastructure & Security
Global Market Development
Avanade Inc.
Avanade is the leading technology integrator
specialising in the Microsoft platform.
Our people help customers around the world
maximise their IT investment and create
comprehensive solutions that dive business
results.
Additional information can be found at
www.avanade.com
Agenda
Why virtualise?
Planning for virtualisation
Identifying candidates for virtualisation?
The process of virtualising
“Gotchas” & hints for virtualisation
Case studies
Why virtualise?
Increased server utilisation
Typically 80% as opposed to 5-15%
Reduced data centre costs
Beyond server hardware to space, power, network, cooling etc & licensing
Increased efficiency/reduced administrative costs:
Quicker server provisioning/deployment
Backup simplification
The next step in server consolidation:
Support for multiple operating systems
Increased security over traditional consolidation
Ideal target for development/testing environments:
Patching and upgrade validation
Security segregation
Planning for virtualisation
Don’t underestimate planning, commitment and upfront
investment
Address organisational challenges: internal business
customers may envisage losing ownership of servers benefits communication and buy-in is essential
Plan to treat virtual servers the same as physical servers
Planning must be completed tightly with networking and
storage teams
Pay specific attention to security and management
Look at testing and administration environments first to gain
experience and confidence before considering production
systems
Plan to control and manage virtual server “sprawl”
Identifying candidates for virtualisation?
Understand and measure performance characteristics
System Center Virtual Machine Manager
Server management tools – MOM (or other)
Windows PerfMon
Avoid high I/O and CPU intensive systems
Consider support on virtual platform of application vendor
Balance with standard server consolidation in production
Typically SQL Server better addressed by “farm” consolidation
Exchange & AD servers scale!
Evaluate host & guest clustering versus standard server
clustering
The process of virtualisation
Approach is generic (applicable to physical and virtual):
Establish a baseline
Rapid build – virtualisation allows copying VMs (VHD and VMC files)
Configuration and refresh – automate (MSI packages and scripts)
“Safe State” the environment – virtualisation allows differencing disks
Test automation (scripted)
Consider Physical to Virtual (P2V) tools
Microsoft VSMT, Microsoft SCVMM, Platespin, LeoStream
Many pre-P2V tasks that must be completed prior to performing any
migration – key step in all P2V work is planning
In reality, you will have to do some work on a small percentage of
your conversions due to the configurations on your source servers
Remember the old saying, Junk in – Junk Out applies with P2V
Often “new build” and data migration is the best approach
“Gotchas” & hints for virtualisation
Exclude VM files from Antivirus real time scans
.vhd .vud .vsv .vfd .vmc
The faster the disk, the faster the Virtual Environment
Consider dedicated disks per VM
Use multiple disks or ideally SAN storage
Use NTFS compression for the files
It seems writing a big chunk to disk is slower than first compressing
the chunk and then write it to disk. Additionally the files are around
30% smaller on the hard disk
/3GB should not be used on the host
This setting increases the user memory space at the expense of
Kernel space. Virtual machines use more kernel memory than user
memory – so enabling this switch on the host will decrease the
amount of virtual machines that you can launch
“Gotchas” & hints continued
VS 2005 runs smoother when selecting Best performance for
“Background Services” and selecting Memory Settings to
Optimize for “System Cache”
Using Gigabit Ethernet network interface cards can improve
overall performance
Even though the guest OS emulates a 100Mb connection, when you
have multiple VMs running, the performance increase will be
noticeable
Use Differencing disks
Differencing disks offer the ability to create a base .vhd (including just
an OS, for example), and then write all differences to a new virtual
disk. The differencing disk might contain alternate applications or
configurations. By doing this you can safe space
“Gotchas” & hints continued
Always make sure the latest Virtual Machine additions are
installed
Always have the VMs connected to a network – even if it is
the “internal only”
Use RDP to connect to your VMs
You can copy and paste data into the virtual machine
You can share data between your host and virtual machine directly
You can share access to your host's printer
The smaller (and less fragmented) the VHD files the faster
In the VM run defrag
Run the VM precompactor
“Gotchas” & hints continued
Create the VHD as fixed size disk
The space is allocated as one big chunk – more fragments will slow
down the system
If you have to copy files from the host to the Guest, use the
shared folders
Copy with drag and drop is 50% slower & copy through network is
only 16 % of the performance of shared folders
Make sure the VMs have sufficient RAM allocated to them
Typically the “working set” from the measured performance
characteristics
This avoids the need to swap too much memory as this is HD
intensive
Case study: Allstate
Problem:
Allstate had ~ 3,500 servers
The number of servers in its data centres was increasing quickly
Vast majority of its servers were using less than 10% CPU
Time required to acquire a new server was from six to eight weeks
Virtual Server 2005 used for test & development environment:
Improved h/w efficiency by reducing server growth and associated costs
Reduced demand for more data centre floor space
Increase server utilization to 35 to 50 percent during the peak shift
Eliminated server acquisition time
Reduced server operating system deployment times from between 1 to 3 hours,
to 5 or 10 minutes
Time savings increased administrator productivity
http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/cases
dy.aspx?casestudyid=53154
Case study: Accenture
Problem:
Test a hosted service offering that included a new third-party desktop
management application
Engineers had four weeks to build the environments
Neither purchasing nor leasing new servers/workstations was a cost-effective
option as the systems were only required for a few months
Virtual Server 2005 & Virtual PC 2004 environment:
Virtual Server: Windows Server 2003/Windows 2000 Server for Active Directory &
SQL Server 2000
Virtual PC: Windows NT Workstation 4.0/Windows 2000 Professional/ Windows
XP Professional/Red Hat Linux
Met goal ahead of schedule, enabling more extensive testing
Significantly reduced its total cost of ownership (accelerated the setup of model
environments by more than 200%, streamlined system administration, improved
IT responsiveness with a smaller staff, and enabled more robust testing of
products and service offerings)
http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=1000004028
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