04/15/2008 - Enterprise Apps on Vmware - ChatThis is a featured page

.Running "enterprise" applications like Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, and many others on VMware is a topic that becomes more popular as virtualization continues to grow. Initial uses of VMware's virtualization products are often focused on test and development or consolidation. Following this initial phase many find that there are administrative and management advantages to using virutalization and want to move more applications or servers onto a virtualized platform. This chat topic focuses on the questions and issues that come up when enterprise applications are under consideration for movement onto a virutlaizaiton product like VMware ESX Server.

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Chat Transcript


DELL-ToddM Hello

DELL-ScottH Hey now!

DELL-ToddM We're just waiting for everybody to join

DELL-ToddM Welcome slbrown

slbrown Hello todd & scott

DELL-ToddM We're just waiting for the crowd to gather

slbrown Understood.

DELL-ToddM Any virtualization of applications stuff you want to cover today?

slbrown Nothing off the top of my head. Do you plan on explaining the way our management applications work with ESX?

DELL-ToddM Sure, Server Administrator, DRAC, and IT Assistant? Others?

DELL-ScottH Classic ESX or embedded?

slbrown SA and SUU on classic and embedded

DELL-ScottH Did you see my post on SUUon ESX?

slbrown Yes I remember seeing it now.

DELL-ScottH www.delltechcenter.com/page/04%2f10%2f2008+-+script+for+applying+dell+server+updates+in+esx+3.x

DELL-ScottH That's for ESX classic...for 3I you'd have to boot from the SBUU

DELL-ToddM Let's get started; I guess that we kind of already have

DELL-ScottH Hey Marc

DELL-ToddM Welcome to this week's TechTuesday discussion around virtualization of "enterprise applications"

dell-marcfarley Yo!

DELL-ToddM Things like Exchange, SQL, Oracle—you know, the important stuff

DELL-ToddM Yo Marc!

dell-marcfarley Just curious, do you know if the servers we run the chat software on are virtualized?

slbrown What about SAP?

DELL-ScottH Todd locked up, he'll be back in a second

DELL-ScottH The hosting company for the chat software is on a dedicated Dell PowerEdge 1950. We upgraded before the EqualLogic chat, which was worth it because we had over 50 attendees, but I'm sure the 1950 had no problems keeping up :-)

DELL-ScottH Todd says we can take a run at SAP too

dell-marcfarley SAP, are you using Oracle as the backend?

DELL-ToddM I return!

dell-marcfarley Ta Dah! nick of time

DELL-ToddM I know that SAP has been run on VMware by quite a few folks for test and development. I haven't yet talked to a customer that is running SAP, but I do know that VMware has some resources dedicated to it. So there is interest, even in running things like SAP. So - in terms of management, OpenMange is supported with VMware ESX. Server Administrator can be installed on the service console of ESX classic, which has been true since ESX 2.x (with increasing level of support over time)

slbrown Okay, thanks

DELL-ToddM With OpenMange 5.4 IT Assistant will see ESX servers as ESX servers (and not an unknown system). The DRAC can also be used with ESX for remote management with full console redirection

DELL-ScottH install guide is easy to follow, and updated for ESX 3.5:www.dell.com/downloads/global/solutions/installing_dell_openmanage_on_esx.pdf

DELL-ToddM Of course, most of the day-to-day management of VMware ESX servers is done with Virtual Center. OpenManage covers the hardware side. There will be integration of some Dell hardware information into Virtual Center with the ESX 3i (or is it 3.5i). So you will be able to view hardware health for the Dell servers in Virtual Center

dell-marcfarley I don't want to ask a dumb question, but what parameters does OpenManage report on that are particularly useful for VMware sites?

DELL-ToddM The stuff that is useful is alerts about hardware failures, or potential failures. So if the temperature is getting too hot, or a disk fails, or a power supply fails, OpenManage will report this, and then action can be taken to avert server downtime or avert VM downtime

Hywel Hello, sorry guess I am a little late

DELL-ToddM So you can VMotion your VMs to other healthy servers while you remedy the alert that OpenManage sent out. We even did a demo that showed how you could automate this type of VMotion in the event of a potential hardware failure

dell-marcfarley Cool, is it still available?

DELL-ToddM I'm trying to figure out if we recorded it and where it would be. We used it in the booth at several trade shows. There was scripting involved to make it all work

dell-marcfarley I'm sure there was scripting—unlike these chats Lol

DELL-ScottH Here's the link to the paper; it's a little dated, but the idea is still solid: www.dell.com/downloads/global/solutions/om-vmware-integration.pdf

DELL-ToddM A lot of this functionality is now covered by VMware HA

DELL-ToddM I feel a good comment coming from Hywel....

Hywel I guess we are chatting about 3i and management, OMSA seems now to be able to do this. We are an Altiris customer to get inventory information, etc. Is there similar progress in this area too? I know Dell is very close to Altiris (now Symantec)

DELL-ScottH Here's a more up-to-date paper on the subject from the Dell Virtulization engineering team: www.dell.com/downloads/global/power/ps2q07-20070131-chandrasekaran.pdf

DELL-ScottH And here's mine on HA DRS with VMware: www.dell.com/downloads/global/vectors/dell_and_vmware_drs_ha_solutions.pdf

Hywel Sorry this is about other topics, but I guess it all comes down to reliability, management, and performance

DELL-ScottH Hmmm, "legal guidelines prohibit us from commenting on future products" ... that may be coming soon :-)

DELL-ToddM The topic for today is virtualization of enterprise applications, but management is important if you are going to virtualize them. That's how we got here. You are right about reliability and performance also being important. The other issue that comes up a lot is support

Hywel We have been VMing a fair number of Microsoft SQL servers recently

DELL-ToddM What type of SQL Server? DBs? OLTP? DSs?

Hywel Some really good performace improvements

DELL-ToddM Performance improvement over previous physical servers?

DELL-ToddM I have seen performance improvement with ESX 3 and 3.5 in terms of I/O for SQL servers

Hywel Data crunchers to form XML and then passing off to be inserted into a data wherehouse

Hywel These were on physical IBM x346 with local disks, and we migrated to PowerEdge1955 on VMware with a SAN backend—about 100 percent improvement in time for the process to complete

DELL-ToddM That's an impressive gain! I would guess that a large part of the performance improvement is the SAN. Did you also consolidate?

Hywel Yeah, we went from about 50 physical servers to 7 :) Plus another 30 VMs

DELL-ScottH Hey, I still hold a little IBM stock; did you have to consolidate that much :-) But I own more Dell stock now!

dell-marcfarley I suspect the data was spread more evenly over the disks, avoiding hot spots?

DELL-ScottH How many more spindles?

DELL-ToddM One of the big stumbling blocks that many run into is the acceptance of application owners of virtualization

DELL-ToddM Guys just don't want their stuff virutlaized because they fear that it will hurt their performance. Did you have to overcome any issues like this in your organization?

dell-marcfarley My guess is that there were fewer spindles going from 50 servers to seven, but the distribution of the data was probbaly better

Hywel Well, this is quite interesting...five physical x345 each with six disks. Changed to three VMFS LUNs with OS, file shares, and DBs, all of which were RAID-5 (as we were short of space); OS on five disks, files shares on nine and DB on 9. We had to move some of the DB onto a RAID-10 later as we got more disks. That improved things even more

DELL-ToddM This is Dell/EMC (Clariion)?

Hywel Yep, CX3-40c

dell-marcfarley It doesn't get much faster than RAID-10

DELL-ToddM You are using the Fibre side of the combo? (I know that Marc is a huge iSCSI fan)

Hywel Nah, can't wait for SSDs to come

dell-marcfarley I won't let that bother me ::biglips

DELL-ToddM Hey, you can get them in the XPS notebooks

DELL-ScottH You have budget, early adopter?

Hywel Just Fibre, in fact I think we made a mistake getting the C not the F

DELL-ToddM I thought that they only made the C (combo) now?

Hywel We got a CX3-40f for a DB and it flies! Four busses like the CX3-80

Hywel I think you were correct earlier when you said, its the SAN that helped; I think we see so many benefits for SAN storage with "normal" systems its hard to put a value to it

DELL-ToddM One question that I get a lot is about Microsoft support for these types of solutions. Did you ever have any concerns about support?

Hywel Yes, this weekend had a major Exchange outage and the second question Microsoft asked was "Is your Esystem on VMware?" I think they said only best efforts will be made to solve the problem...but it does make you think

DELL-ToddM Hey, I thought there was a don't ask/don't tell policy! So, you guys don't have Exchange on VMware today?

Hywel Well, I have a small system, in our production environment on VMware, but it's really an SMTP relay. Thinking about our Office system at the moment

DELL-ToddM I have tried to find examples of people finding issues with Exchange that were due to VMware, but have not found one yet. Although, I guess that searching with Google and within VMTN is not an exhaustive search

Hywel No but another Microsoft support guy suggested they have *lots* of ISA problems due to VMware. I doubt it, to be onest

DELL-ToddM ::biggrin

Hywel I saw the other day that IBM broke some record hosting Exchange on VMware, which is interesting

DELL-ToddM I think that performance can be an issue if you try to move too large a workload

DELL-ToddM Yes, I saw that post too. Very interesting

DELL-ScottH Todd was just talking about that this am, and said he's going to do 16,001!

DELL-ToddM We just got a new server in the lab that would be capable of the same user count on a single box

DELL-ToddM PowerEdge R900 with 128 GB of RAM: www.delltechcenter.com/page/04%2f14%2f2008+-+screenshot+for+geeks+-+comments

Dell-MarcF We need a new section for VMware in the Guinness book

DELL-ToddM The methodology that was used to create the Exchange VMs was inline with what I presented at VMworld in September: www.delltechcenter.com/page/exchange+and+vmware

DELL-ToddM Using 1000-user VMs to scale up Exchange

DELL-ToddM I'm not sure that running 16000 Exchange users on a single server is something that most people will do, but it is a cool number

DELL-ScottH 16001 is a cooler number

Hywel Sorry, back to work not play ;) The only big issue I am seeing with VMware at the moment is the network performance. We struggle to get >250 MB/sec. out of the VMs; do you guys see this?

DELL-ToddM I haven't measured the network throughput from VMs during the testing that I have done

DELL-ScottH Click on a link, eh?

DELL-ToddM Most of the time it has been OLTP or Exchange messaging traffic, which is small. I will see what information I can find and post it to the home page for this chat

Hywel Yeah, unfortunately more of our DB maintenance plans still use SQL; backups for the network performace is pretty inportant

Hywel Yeah clicked on link :S

DELL-ToddM Have you looked into a VCB-type of a backup solution?

Hywel Yeah, I am using VBC with vRanger, but...

DELL-ToddM I know this is an issue with DB, as the database has to be stopped or paused or something to ensure consistency

Hywel There isn't any guessing as we have had problems with the lgtodriver and had to disable it. I wish they could synch with VSS and VCB; that would be really cool

DELL-ToddM I believe that VMware (and some others) are working on that

Hywel I think all in all that VMware, whether it be with SQL or whatever, really has so many more positives than negatives—even the sceptical at work are won over with it

DELL-ToddM I agree that the gains in flexibility of managment (and general cool stuff you can do with VMotion) make it pretty compelling

Hywel Yeah, one thing not sure that you guys have come across; we were pretty low on memory, about 70 percent usage across the HA cluster; when we were upgrading from 16 GB per server to 32
GB and put servers into maintenance we struggled with some SQL servers. As VMotion migrated some machines it doesn't seem to be as good judging memory as CPU, hence some servers got close to their physcial limit. It was my understanding that they would start using the VSWP files on the VMFS volume but SQL seemed to struggle with this and two hung :(

Hywel I thought the VSWP file would be used in a situation where there was low physical RAM but SQL failed to use this

DELL-ToddM I did see some performance issues with some Exchange 2007 VMs and SQL Server 2005 VMs when I oversubscribed the RAM and then did VMotion. The peformance would be okay until after the VMotion, and then the VMs would struggle in terms of performance. But I didn't actually hang them up. They were struggling becuase they were using the VSWP files and performance suffered as a result

Hywel In fact it was even worse than just hanging because VMNware then tried to VMotion them to another server and failed half way through and then had to wait for a time out

DELL-ToddM So the lesson learned was to keep extra capacity for things like this?

Hywel Yes deffo

DELL-ToddM Not the best answer, but you did consolidate down to a much smaller number of servers

Hywel But this is one thing DRS doesn't do well is try and balance RAM as well as a CPU

DELL-ToddM Good point

Hywel Well, we consolidated then lots more were added...VM sprawl!

DELL-ToddM Well, that's one of the things that happens ::biggrin

Hywel Yeah

DELL-ToddM Management of VMs includes a different set of things than physical servers

Hywel I am really glad i came across this site—a real good resource. The hardest thing I find with work is quickly finding the things that are important for a given task and not having to read whole manuals to locate something written in "code"; with the correct input I think it could really help users of Dell equipment

DELL-ToddM Thanks for the comments. Well, we are way over our time. Should probably wrap it up

DELL-ScottH I'm with you on that; welcome aboard and we welcome all your contributions to the site

Hywel Especially after moving from IBM servers it was hard to userstand what software could do and how to do it

DELL-ToddM You're a decoder ring guy

DELL-ScottH Did you use our secert decoder ring?

Hywel Nope?

DELL-ScottH www.delltechcenter.com/page/04%2f03%2f2008+-+secret+decoder+ring

Hywel Did i stumble across some CIA trap ;)

DELL-ToddM Hey, Scott. What is next week's topic?

Hywel Ah, I saw the logo but didn't read the writing ;)

DELL-ScottH Quick tip: if you right-click the links, you won't get kicked out :-)

DELL-ScottH Next week's topic is "OpenManage – Power Monitoring"

DELL-ToddM Hywel, thanks for the excellent discussion

DELL-ScottH Ues, thanks

DELL-ToddM You can contact us anytime through the Dell TechCenter discussion forums

Hywel Ah, cool topic. One tip, can you please send an international time–friendly invite? :) What is CST anyway?

Hywel I have seen our PowerEdge R900 power reading that is cool

DELL-ScottH Central Standard Time U.S. (-600) I believe

Hywel Now all we need it a rack layout with IT Assistant and the servers in it, and hey presto ;)

DELL-ToddM We have a link to a calendar invite that I think is Time Zone aware on the chat page: www.delltechcenter.com/page/chat+topics+and+transcripts

DELL-ScottH Yes, I've been asking for that. What I do here is to create groups called Rack 1, Rack 2, etc. and place the servers in those groups

DELL-ToddM I've gotta run to another meeting, but really appreciate the conversation. I hope to see you next week

Hywel Yes, we have a limit of 2 kW per rack; this is what we need. yes i'll try to be there thanks.





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