Hi i am looking at consolidating 8 servers or so into a vmware solution
I have had a chance to view a webinar/training on the product and it looks pretty sweet,
just wondering what kind of questions i should be asking myself about the product?
What experiences have you had with the product.
Ease of use, disaster recovery/backups of the virtual environments etc
Does VMware also have a product for virtualizing the desktop as well?
Is anyone gone to that level as well yet?
any feed back would be appreciated
thanks
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as far as backups doesn't VMware automatically take snapshots of the VM machines images?
what exactly are you backing up to tape and how are you doing it?/third party software or is the backup builtin to VMware, because from what i understand the VMware software is capable of that
your 2 IBM servers are basically running 35-40 virtual servers and load balancing across the 2?
thanks
I support three different environments with hp servers for the hosts connected to hp eva 4400 sans.
Now be careful with snapshot assumption. If and when you move to virtualizing, snapshots are not for backups. They are meant purely to be "very" temporary(two or three days max). You degrade performance the more snapshots you have and the longer you keep them them around.
For backups there are products such as Virtual Center Backup. This is a proxy application, when enabled, will allow you to make a full backup copy of the vmdk and configuration files.
You can checkout other product such as veeam.com also.
VMware does have a product for virtualizing desktops. Its called VMWare View(formerly VDI).
For thin client provisioning, I think I would prefer thinapp provisiong with products such as Citrix better un less you have developers who need a desktop.
You can set VMware to take snap shots. The downside is that I don't believe that they delete and rotate out to old so you end up using up valuable hard drive space. nappy_d is right that veeam is a good product. My boss has played with it. The backup built-in to VMware seems really good, but under ESX it's requirements were not worth reworking my entire backup scheme since my environment still has physical servers in it. With Vsphere, the VMware backup is more friendly and we may look at that when we get around to upgrading.
As far as what I do when backing up, I am using ArcServe and treating each VM just as though it were a real box. So I set ArcServe to attach to each VM like it was physical, and I back up to tape the files that I want. In some cases that may be the entire server, in others just critical files.
The servers that we have are capable of running even more servers that we have running at the moment. As far as number it ultimately comes down to the resources you through at virtualization and what each server is doing. For example, a simple print or file server will use way less resources than an indexing server. You can set the ESX environment to load balance and it will VMotion automatically to move VMs from one server to the other to keep that balance. You can also do it automatically. VMotion is nice for failures of one physical ESX server or when you need to do maintenance on the severs or the ESX software. The one thing that you have to keep in mind is that you can't fill any one box up to more than 60%-70% utilization of resources or when one box has to VMotion all of it's VMs to the other, the performance will be in the tank.
Each of our servers also have 5 NICs that are teamed to provide adequate throughput for all of the VMs.
Let me take the questions one by one
1)What experiences have you had with the product.
Ans. Since the ESX kernel is based on Linux, it is a very stable product and all works as expected. No surprises as you progress.
2) Ease of use, disaster recovery/backups of the virtual environments etc
Ans. Its was very easy to configure for me. Backup the entire VM as its just files and hence restoration is also easy. If you need file level backup then you need to use VCB and 3rd party backup software.
3)Does VMware also have a product for virtualizing the desktop as well?
Ans. Yes its called VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) You can register the and download test the same from www.vmware.com
4) Is anyone gone to that level as well yet?
Ans. Many has implemented VDI with success.
vmkernel is not based on linux.
CPU is normally not the bottle neck anymore. As long as you have enough memory, storage is normally the bottle neck.
We typically see 20-50VMs per host.
Lars
example host that is in prod
Business Accounts
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by: jhyieslaPosted on 2009-09-03 at 13:19:02ID: 25254512
We use VMware ESX server in an enterprise environment. I have two big-boy IBM servers and a SANS array running about 35-40 servers. I started out with just one smaller IBM server and only 10-12 servers in the virtual environment. We have been very happy with this product. It's been stable and allowed us to be more nimble when we have to get a new server up and running quickly. The two servers allowed us to do the VMotion thing which has been great when doing updates to the ESX software. Currently I just use regular tape backup of the server environment as when I had physical servers. However, I am looking to integrate either the VMware backup solution or some third party for a better look at disaster recovery.
You can definitely do virtual desktops as well. We've only played with that a little since it doesn't buy us much in our current environment. But as we go forward and it becomes time to retire desktop machines, it may make more sense.
I would highly recommend looking at VMware and virtualization in general for your environment.