Actual case
Warner Bros. is a creation, production and distribution in one large comprehensive international entertainment company, its business all over the power supply, television, home video, animation, books, games, and broadcast industries.
Problems: numerous number of business models resulting in a large number of single application server filled with data center room with limited space, power, cooling and other environmental capacity needs has become a serious problem, administrators have to face increasingly onerous routine maintenance tasks every day, low efficiency. Facing the new business, the company faces the following challenges:
the need to deploy 60 new servers every year;
the current environment there are more than 400 servers;
system management, maintenance staff more difficult;
investment in data centers is increasing, including power, cooling, network ports, and network storage requirements, etc., need to invest a lot of money and human resources;
the deployment of the new system is not always completed on time;
the test environment is always limited or no use;
no proper process to stop and repeal outdated machines;
all servers resource utilization rate of only about 25%;
there are always many plans require maintenance downtime requirements.
What is the use of virtualization technology? Solutions
for the problems faced by Warner Bros., IBM to provide a complete set of hardware and software virtualization solutions, including VMware DRS (VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler) distributed resource scheduling solutions and VMware HA (VMware High Availability) High availability redundant More than two-part program to solve.
DRS VMware
VMware DRS is for the "common server resources management, distribution and use," the IT manager wants to achieve the goals but difficult to achieve the specified solutions. It may be a set of hardware resources of the computer logic reorganize resource pools, and then dynamically balanced distribution of these computing resources. VMware DRS can be pre-specified according to business needs and the importance of appropriate resource allocation principles, and continue to monitor utilization of the resource pool, allocate resources only for the relevant virtual machine. When a virtual opportunity to increased load, DRS through reallocation of virtual machines to physical servers in the resource pool, assign more resources.
VMware DRS can help you achieve the goal:
based on business goals and optimize resources to ensure that the most valuable applications use more resources:
respond to changes in business automatically and continuously optimized hardware centralized management and monitoring;
improving the efficiency of the system administrator a single system administrator to monitor and effectively manage all resources;
automatic hardware maintenance, when a physical server needs maintenance, DRS will automatically migrate all virtual machines to other physical machines in order to achieve zero-downtime server maintenance;
a high degree of scalability. When adding new physical servers to a resource pool, DRS can automatically take advantage of the new computing power to redistribute virtual machine.
Architecture Analysis: Why VMware DRS it? This is because, DRS automatically and intelligently balance resources among virtual machines, DRS allows users to define their own some resources allocation rules to determine how virtual machines share the resources available and how to optimize the use of these resources across multiple virtual machines . When an application in which the virtual opportunity to increased load, DRS first resource allocation based on pre-established rules, determine the priority of the application. When determined to meet the requirements, the allocation of additional resources to the virtual machine.
Resource allocation way may advance to take advantage of server resources by virtual machine migration capabilities, so as to achieve rational allocation of resources. DRS VMware VMotion achieve these goals by the software, the operation for the end user is completely transparent. VMware DRS can be configured to operate automatically or manually. In automatic mode, DRS after determining the most probable VM distribution scheme, the automatic assignment of virtual machines to the most appropriate physical machine; In manual mode, DRS can suggest VM optimal deployment scenarios, managed by the system members decide whether to make the appropriate changes.
VMware HA
new server virtualization Another important point is that VMware HA deployment architecture, it is the entire server system safe and reliable operation of the "first line of defense." The traditional way to the biggest problem hot standby machine is likely to cause a lot of idle resources: Under normal operation, all backup servers are idle, not only caused loss calculation resources, but also waste a lot of power and cooling resources, investment very low rate of return.
In the new VMware HA architecture, all servers concurrently server and a backup server, the average share computing tasks, to provide reliable computing support. When a computer running MVware ESX physical server goes down, all running automatically switch to virtual machines on the VMware server to other servers, ensure that relevant business 24 hours without interruption.
Fault-tolerant compared to conventional solutions, VMware HA architecture not only significantly improve the resource utilization of the server, but also can reduce the hardware failure caused by server downtime and service disruption time greatest extent, with the least cost and the most simple management the most basic way to provide redundancy protection for all applications. In addition, a variety of operating systems and applications, VMware HA unified approach avoids the availability of additional overhead and complexity for different operating systems or applications using different schemes brings.
Architecture Analysis: VMware HA virtual machine in the resource pool monitoring program, the installation of the agent in the virtual machine can maintain heartbeats between each virtual machine. When VMware virtual machine discovery lose heart, it will attempt to restart the failed server on other VMware virtual machine. VMware HA will ensure that any time when the server has sufficient hardware resources of the physical server goes down, the resource pool, the failure of a virtual machine in a smooth start on other servers, VMFS file system used by VMware, supported by SAN / iSCSI / NFS and other storage protocols, allowing different VMware servers to access the same virtual disk file, this feature allows VMware HA to achieve a very simple and convenient.
Program implementation of hardware and software tools required
hardware:
IBM x445 server
IBM System x3950 server system
IBM server storage systems
software systems:
VMware ESX Server virtualization suite
IBM Director Server Tools
Support and services from the point of view, IBM can provide global technical support for server virtualization, as the only interface, IBM can provide technical support throughout virtualization solutions, including hardware and software in two parts. IBM offers a wide range of VMware virtual hardware platforms, including systems Power Systems, System x / z series servers and IBM storage systems and so on.
From the point of view management system, IBM IMB Director in the integrated management of the virtual machine, the virtual machine management as an equivalent for the physical management of the basic machine, the VMM as IMB Director expansion modules integrated IBM Director management software and VMwre VirtualCenter to achieve a single point of management for virtual machines and physical machines using VMM, customers can use the Director interface in VMware and VMotion capabilities to migrate virtual machines can also be combined Director of the hardware state of alarm configuration, the VMotion virtual machine migration configured to automatically complete, this level of integration and automation can help customers achieve flexible virtual infrastructure.
Effect after the implementation
by VMware DRS and VMware HA, consolidated data center will focus on applications and existing services onto fewer highly scalable, highly reliable enterprise-class servers, not only significantly improve server resource utilization, and in It integrates more free resources on the basis of this, to lay the foundation for the implementation of other new projects. These effects mainly in:
save 40 new servers procurement plan;
out of the original 14 old-fashioned servers, the number of critical servers is reduced to five, electricity, heat loss dropped significantly;
won the pole and rapid deployment with scalable architecture, more centralized resource management, but also easy;
it built 70 virtual machines on three IBM x445 server to meet the normal development of existing businesses;
set up 56 on two IBM System x3950 server platform virtual servers, ensure software testers with minimal hardware environment really quickly build test environment;
use VMware P2V tools, the ongoing three applications successfully transplanted from a physical environment to a virtual environment, a more rational allocation of resources;
14 deploy new applications directly to the new VMware virtual server environments, saving a lot of money and hardware resources;
by VMware DRS basically achieved zero downtime. When a server down for maintenance or upgrades, which is responsible for the business or service list with VMotion to migrate to another server in real time, ensure business and service 24 hours without interruption.
By Virtual Center, to achieve the integration server management, simplifying the process management systems.
Reproduced in: https: //www.cnblogs.com/lvsong/archive/2010/09/09/1822278.html