Virtualization Fundamental

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Virtualization Fundamental
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Chandra Shekher August 26, 2013 at 4:50 pm 0 Comment(s)

Virtualization is not a new concept. it was introduced and implemented 30 years back as a
way to logically partition mainframe computers into different virtual machines. The ability to run multiple application and processes at the same time is called "Multitasking" . But Mainframe computers were very expensive and it was very critical to getting out most from the computing power. Then Client/Server computing introduced in 1990 and it changed the previous centralized computing to decentralized. Although it provided the advantage of powerful PC and enable users to support their own application and business applications but it also become very difficult to mange these environments. Security became an overriding issue, Data storage and recovery became a concern. As a result, we back to the centralization model with much broader then the old mainframe virtualization. VMware’s founders resurrected the virtual machine concept when problems like server proliferation and the need to run multiple applications in dedicated operating systems started becoming serious issues for IT managers and software developers. VMware developed revolutionary technology to efficiently virtualized x86 systems that,for the first time, allowed unmodified x86 operating systems and applications to run in true virtual machines with excellent performance Today Virtualization is an abstraction layer that de-couples the physical hardware from the operating system to deliver greater IT resource utilization and flexibility‖. Multiple virtual machines can operate concurrently on a single x86 host system. Each one can run a different operating system and application stack. VMware’s virtualization technology provides each virtual machine with a true representation of an x86 computer with its own set of virtual hardware (e.g., RAM, CPU, NIC, etc.) upon which an operating system and applications are loaded. The VMware virtualization layer gives the virtual machines direct access to the underlying x86 hardware – an important distinction from the much slower emulation technology that must process all virtual machine operations in software.

Without Virtualization

With Virtualization

Following are some of the key features of Virtualization:      

Memory compression, over commitment and deduplication. Intelligent CPU virtualization Highly compatible with various servers hardware, storage and OS. Advanced security. Easy management Cost Effective. Supports Green Computing.

In the next article, we will start section 1 and will be discussing about the Installation and Configuration vCenter Server .

Plan, Install, Configure vCenter and VMware ESXi -Part1
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Chandra Shekher August 28, 2013 at 12:27 pm 1 Comment(s)

Virtualization Architecture
There are two virtualization architecture provided by VMware. A) Hosted Virtualization Architecture B) Native Virtualization Architecture Both Architecture are completely transportable between each other. Hosted Virtualization Architecture : VMware's GSX Server, Workstation, Vmware Player, ACE use this architecture. The virtualization layer install on the top of the host Operating System and run like an application on the OS. It completely relies on the host OS's device support and the physical resource management. The virtualization layer doesnt have comtrol over the allocation of the physical hardware resources.

Hosted Virtualization Architecture

Native Virtualization Architecture: It provides bare-metal virtualization. it installs directly onto the harware. ESX server is based on this virtualization architecture. ESX server installs directly onto the hardware. it controls the share of the hardware resources allocated to the virtual machine. Second part of VMware's native virtualization is the Service console. This is a stripped-down virtual machine instance that controls starting, stopping, and administrating the other virtual machine on the physical system.It can also be used for agents and helper applications that need visibility to all of the virtual machines on the physical system.

Native Virtualization Architecture In this Series, we will be talking about native virtualization architecture. ESX Server, which is a component of VMware vSphere, is based on native architecture. VMware vShpere Component VMware vShpere 5 enables Administrators to have greater control over resource allocation to virtual workloads and extends fine-grained resource allocation controls to more types of resources. IT Administrators have all the tools they need to run an enterprise environment ranging from a few servers up to thousands of servers with dynamic resource controls, high availability, unprecedented fault-tolerance features, distributed resource management, and backup tools included as part of the suite. The vSphere product suite includes the following products and features:


VMware ESXi -

VMware ESXi is the hypervisor and the foundation of virtualization within the vSphere product suite. The core of the vShpere 5 is the hypervisor which is the virtualization layer that serves the rest of the product line of vShpere product suite.


VMware vCenter Server -

VMware vCenter Server provides a centralized management utility for all ESXi hosts and their respective VMs. vCenter Server allows IT administrators to deploy, manage, monitor, automate, and secure a virtual infrastructure in a centralized way.


vSphere Update Manager -

VMware vSphere Update Manager is a plug-in for vCenter Server that helps users keep their ESXi hosts and select VMs patched with the latest updates.


VMware vSphere Client and vSphere Web Client -

The vShpere Client is a Windows-based application which provides GUI interface to manage ESXi host, either directly or through an instance of vCenter Server. vShpere client can be

connected either directly or through an instance of vCenter server but the full set of management capabilities are only available when connected through vCenter Server. The vSphere Web Client provides a dynamic, web-based user interface for managing a virtual infrastructure, and enables vSphere administrators to manage their infrastructure without first needing to install the full vSphere Client on a system. However, the vSphere Web Client in its current form only provides a subset of the functionality available to the ―full‖ vSphere Client


VMware vShield Zones -

VMWare vShield Zones builds on vSphere’s virtual networking functionality to add virtual firewall functionality. vShield zone is a virtual firewall, built on vsphere virtual networking functionality. Using the administrators can see and manage the network traffic flow between virtual network switches and apply security policies across entire groups of machines.


VMware vCenter Orchestrator -

VMware vCenter Orchestrator is a powerful tool to build automated workflows in the virtualized data center. vCenter Orchestrator plug-ins extends the functionality to include manipulating Microsoft Active Directory, Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS), and VMware vCloud Director.


vSphere Virtual Symmetric Multi-Processing -

The vSphere Virtual Symmetric Multi-Processing (vSMP or Virtual SMP) product allows administrators to create VMs with multiple virtual processors. vSphere Virtual SMP is not the licensing product that allows ESXi to be installed on servers with multiple processors; it is the technology that allows the use of multiple processors inside a VM


vSphere vMotion and Storage vMotion -

vSphere vMotion, also known as live migration, is a feature of ESXi and vCenter Server that allows an administrator to move a running VM from one physical host to another physical host without having to power off the VM, with no downtime and with no loss of network connectivity. vSphere Storage vMotion provides the ability to move the storage for a running VM between datastores, Storage vMotion without downtime. This feature ensures that outgrowing datastores or moving to a new SAN does not force an outage for the affected VMs. vMotion moves the execution of a VM, relocating the CPU and memory footprint between physical servers but leaving the storage untouched. Storage vMotion builds on the idea and principle of vMotion by providing the ability to leave the CPU and memory footprint untouched on a physical server but migrating a VM’s storage while the VM is still running.


vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler ( DRS ) -

VSphere DRS leverages vMotion to provide automatic distribution of resource utilization across multiple ESXi hosts that are configured in a cluster. ESXi clusters are fundamentally different from windows clusters as it operates in an active-active mode to aggregate and combine into a shared pool instead of windows server cluster’s active-passive or active-active-passive mode. The underlying concept of aggregating physical hardware to serve a common goal is the same but the technology, configuration, and feature sets are quite different between VMware ESXi clusters and Windows Server clusters.


vSphere Storage DRS -

vSphere Storage DRS is a major new feature of VMware vSphere 5. Just as vSphere DRS helps to balance CPU and memory utilization across a cluster of ESXi hosts, Storage DRS helps balance storage capacity and storage performance across a cluster of datastores using mechanisms that echo those used by vSphere DRS. It use SvMotion to move VM between datastores.


Storage I/O Control and Network I/O Control -

Storage I/O Control allows vSphere administrators to assign relative priority to storage I/O as well as assign storage I/O limits to VMs. These settings are enforced cluster-wide; when an ESXi host detects storage congestion through an increase of latency beyond a user-configured threshold, it will apply the settings configured for that VM. The result is that VMware administrators can ensure that the VMs that need priority access to storage resources get the resources they need. Network I/O Control provides VMware administrators a way to more reliably ensure that network bandwidth is properly allocated to VMs based on priority and limits.


Profile-Driven Storage -

This is a new feature in vSphere 5 and enable administrators to use storage capabilities and to ensure that VMs are residing on storage that is able to provide the necessary levels of capacity, performance, availability, and redundancy. Profile-driven storage is built on two key components: This functionality gives vSphere administrators much greater control over the placement of VMs on shared storage and helps ensure that the appropriate functionality for each VM is indeed being provided by the underlying storage.


vSphere High Availability -

The vSphere HA feature provides an automated process for restarting VMs that were running on an ESXi host at a time of complete server failure. The vSphere HA feature does not use the vMotion technology as a means of migrating servers to another host. vMotion is applicable only for planned migrations, where both the source and destination ESXi host are running and functioning properly. In a vSphere HA failover situation, there is no anticipation of failure; it is not a planned outage, and therefore there is no time to perform a vMotion operation. vSphere HA is intended to address unplanned downtime because of the failure of a physical ESXi host.



vSphere Fault Tolerance -

vSphere Fault Tolerance provides greater levels of high availability then vSphere can provides. As we know that vSphere HA protects against unplanned physical server failure by providing a way to automatically restart VMs upon physical host failure. This need to restart a VM in the event of a physical host failure means that some downtime—generally less than three minutes— is incurred. vSphere FT eliminates any downtime in the event of a physical host failure. It uses vLockstep technology, based on VMware’s earlier ―record and replay‖ functionality. vSphere FT maintains a mirrored secondary VM on a separate physical host that is kept in lockstep with the primary VM. So if the physical host on which the primary VM is running fails, the secondary VM can immediately step in and take over without any loss of connectivity. vSphere FT will also automatically re-create the secondary (mirrored) VM on another host if the physical host on which the secondary VM is running fails. In the event of multiple host failures—say, the hosts running both the primary and secondary VMs failed—vSphere HA will reboot the primary VM on another available server, and vSphere FT will automatically create a new secondary VM.


vSphere Storage APIs for Data Protection and VMware Data Recovery -

VMware vSphere 5 has two key components to address the need of backup:vSphere Storage APIs for Data Protection (VADP) :- VADP is a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that backup vendors leverage in order to provide enhanced backup functionality of virtualized environments. VADP enables functionality like file-level backup and restore; support for incremental, differential, and full-image backups; native integration with backup software; and support for multiple storage protocols VMware Data Recovery (VDR) :- VMware Data Recovery (VDR) is Vmware’s own tool to provide backup solution. VDR leverages VADP to provide a full backup solution for smaller VMware vSphere.

Hope this information will be useful. In the next section we will be discussing about VMware vCenter Server.

Plan, Install, Configure vCenter and VMware ESXi -Part2
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Chandra Shekher October 11, 2013 at 11:05 pm 0 Comment(s)

Install and Configure vCenter Server

In my previous article, I explained about the virtualization architecture and the various component of VMWare vSphere suite. In this article we will be talking about the installation and configuration of vCenter Server. The ability to manage the infrastructure from a central location becomes very important as the size of the virtual infrastructure grows. vCenter Server servers as a centralized management tool for exsi hosts and their respective virtual machines. This is a Windows-based application. It acts like a proxy that performs all tasks on the individual ESXi hosts which are added as members of a vCenter Server. VMware includes vCenter Server licensing in the every kit and every edition of vSphere. Licensing will be discussed in a separate article. VMware offer a couple of different editions of vCenter Server like vCenter Server Essentials, vCenter Server Foundation, and vCenter Server Standard, but here we will be focusing on vCenter Server Standard. vCenter Server offers core services in the following areas:


Resource management for ESXi hosts and VMs

 Template management  VM deployment  VM management  Scheduled tasks  Statistics and logging  Alarms and event management  ESXi host management vCenter Server Deployment Planning and Designing vCenter Server is a critical application for managing virtual infrastructure. Its implementation should be carefully designed and executed to ensure availability and data protection. When discussing the deployment of vCenter Server, some of the most common questions includes Hardware, Database server and Disaster recovery. Hardware for vCenter Server The minimum hardware requirement for the windows server base version of vCenter Server are :Processor - Dual-core 64-bit CPU or Two 64-bit CPUs and 2 GHz processor or faster. RAM - 3 GB or more. Disk storage - 3 GB of free disk space. Network - Gigabit Ethernet Adapter Operating System – 64 bit Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 JR', Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2.

These are minimum system requirements. Large enterprise environments with many ESXi hosts and VMs must scale the vCenter Server system accordingly. Disk storage allocation is of minimal concern when planning a vCenter Server installation because the data is generally stored in an SQL Server, Oracle, or DB2 database on a remote server vCenter Server Database Server vCenter Server requires database to store and organize server data. vCenter Server supports the following database servers :IBM DB2 9.5 = fix pack 5 required and fix pack 7 recommended IBM DB2 9.7 = fix pack 2 required and fix pack 3a recommended Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Express = bundled with vCenter Server Microsoft SQL Server 2005 = 32-bit or 64-bit, SP3 is required, and SP4 is recommended Microsoft SQL Server 2008 = 32-bit or 64-bit, SP1 is required, and SP2 is recommended Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Oracle 10g R2 = Version 10.2.0.4 required Oracle 11g R1 = Version 11.1.0.7 required Oracle 11g R2 = Version 11.2.0.1 with patch 5 required

For small size vSphere Deployment, we can use SQL Server 2008 Express Edition . But for large environment, we should use separate database server. Planning for vCenter Server Availability Plan for business continuity and disaster recovery is very important for vCenter Server high availability. While vCenter Sever is down, we will not be able to clone VMs or deploy new VMs from templates and we will lose the centralized authentication and role based administration of the ESXi hosts. Assuming that database server are saparate and designed to handle data loss or corruption and highly available ( Clustered ), the First approach for vCenter HA is vCenter Server heartbeat. it was introduced with Virtual Center/vCenter Server 2.5 and also available with vCenter Server 5 ( vCenter Heartbeat 6.4 ). it automate both the process of keeping the active and passive vCenter Server instances synchronized and the process of failing over from one to another.

Now we are ready to install vCenter Server. In the next section we will be discussing about VMware vCenter Server Installation.

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