Rethinking virtualization: Why enterprises need a sustainable virtualization strategy over hodge-podge approaches

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RedHat's Xen is good enough for us

Sorry I didn't learn much from this other than how cool HP is and their business partners. But I'll share what we know. We're a large transportation company in north America.

We've got more than a thousand physical servers, and a hundred virtual servers and growing rapidly. The problem with virtuals isn't that different from physical servers. Sure you need VLANs, clustering, and a SAN. Our Hypervisors have at minimum two network connections (1 heartbeats, 1 'public' configured to support multiple VLANs) and two SAN connections.

Just like scaling physical servers you need the following:
1) a plan
2) tight build standards
3) inventory (where stuff is)
4) constantly exercised standardized recovery processes (including disaster recovery)
5) know how capacity is being consumed
6) scalable monitoring approach
7) an understanding of how networks..well work
8) a little code to pull things together

What you don't need:
1) PFM approaches, like 'special' network and I/O cards
2) Don't loose site that the point of using commodity hardware is so you can take advantage of competition between hardware vendors
3) Outsourcers, unless your infrastructure is not efficient or effective. The outsourcers are not better than what you can get by hiring smart people. This approach is currently not for the large players.

What you should consider:
1) CMDB (configuration management data base). Really, you do not need to have a full ITIL implementation, just what is good enough for your enterprise. Don't spend too much on it.



What you know you shouldn't do, but you will (at least with RedHat):
1) write a little code to create a single pane of glass to manage, and recover
(it is worth it, took us a few days,like 3 to code what we needed thus far)

What you have to look forward to, at least with Linux:
1) KVM (very cool, very simple, if it proven to performs well)

Posted by: sys_engineer   Posted on: 07/14/09 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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