3. ПРОБЛЕМА 1: РОСТ ОБЪЕМОВ ДАННЫХ Source: IDC, March 2007 Applications Driving Data Growth
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5. ИНТЕЛЛЕКТУАЛЬНЫЙ ЦОД – СРЕДСТВО РЕШЕНИЯ ИТ - ЗАДАЧ Минимальный простой Простота установки и управления ИНТЕЛЛЕКТУАЛЬНЫЙ ЦОД Высокая доступность Балансировка нагрузки Энергоэффективность Консолидация ЦОД Расширение ресурсов онлайн
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7. ИДЕАЛЬНАЯ СЕРВЕРНАЯ ПЛАТФОРМА ДЛЯ ВИРТУАЛИЗАЦИИ
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15. РАСПРОСТРАНЕННЫЕ ЗАБЛУЖДЕНИЯ КАСАЮЩИЕСЯ БЛЕЙДОВ И ВИРТУАЛИЗАЦИИ PowerEdge M710 18 модулей памяти (DIMM) 144 GB RAM PowerEdge R710 18 модулей памяти (DIMM) 144 GB RAM «БЛЕЙД-СЕРВЕРЫ НЕ ОБЕСПЕЧИВАЮТ ТАКОГО ЖЕ ОБЪЕМА ОПЕРАТИВНОЙ ПАМЯТИ »
16. РАСПРОСТРАНЕННЫЕ ЗАБЛУЖДЕНИЯ КАСАЮЩИЕСЯ БЛЕЙДОВ И ВИРТУАЛИЗАЦИИ PowerEdge R710 4 x встроенных GigaBit Ethernet 4 x PCIe слота (I/O-slots) PowerEdge M710 4 x встроенных GigaBit Ethernet 4 x Mezzanin карты (I/O-slots) « ОБЪЕМ ВВОДА/ВЫВОДА ПОДДЕРЖИВАЕМЫЙ БЛЕЙДАМИ НЕДОСТАТОЧЕН ДЛЯ ВИРТУАЛИЗАЦИИ»
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22. ИДЕАЛЬНАЯ ПЛАТФОРМА ХРАНЕНИЯ ДЛЯ ВИРТУАЛИЗАЦИИ
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24. ВИРТУАЛЬНЫМ СЕРВЕРАМ НУЖНО ВИРТУАЛЬНОЕ ХРАНИЛИЩЕ ДАННЫХ Physical Infrastructure Virtualized Assets Горизонтально и вертикально масштабируемая, надежная инфраструктура для серверов и СХД Network Fabric
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28. МНОГОУРОВНЕВАЯ АРХИТЕКТУРА ХРАНЕНИЯ Pool 1: PS6000S SSD arrays Virtual Desktops / Oracle tempdbs Low Latency, High IOPS performance/$ Pool 3: PS6000X 10K RPM SAS at R50 & PS6000E 7.2K RPM SATA at R5 Email, mainstream databases, Hyper-V, web servers, file data Auto-load balanced combo of Good IOPS/$ and $/TB Pool 4: PS65000E 48-drive 7.2K SATA arrays at RAID 6 Large file shares, archive and backups Best $/TB Pool 2: PS6000XVs 15K RPM SAS at R10 for critical Oracle/SQL OLTP databases & ESX servers High IOPS & Capacity Combo Производительность Емкость
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31. EXTRAORDINARY CUSTOMER SATISFACTION “ Would you recommend an EqualLogic product to others?” Source: Yankee Group, “EqualLogic Customer Satisfaction Survey”, July 2008, * Yes * 98% наших клиентов, купивших EqualLogic , рекомендуют другим EqualLogic PS-Series
32. ПРОИЗВОДИТЕЛЬНОСТЬ iSCSI В ВИРТУАЛЬНОЙ СРЕДЕ Старый миф : iSCSI недостаточно производителен в сравнении с FC Факты : iSCSI обеспечивает схожий уровень производительности на произвольном доступе и чуть меньший на последовательном чтении Dell EqualLogic : PS5000 обеспечил на больше виртуальных серверов по сравнению с HP EVA 4400 24 18 * Principled Technologies Report, Oct 2008 33%
37. АВТОМАТИЧЕСКАЯ БАЛАНСИРОВКА НАГРУЗКИ Storage Pool Disks RAID PS Series Array 1 Pages RAID 10, 50 or 5 Archive SQL Exchange Switched Gb Ethernet Archive Exchange SQL Automatic and transparent load balancing across arrays PS Series Array 2 RAID 10, 50 or 5
38. АВТОМАТИЧЕСКАЯ ОПТИМИЗАЦИЯ ПРОИЗВОДИТЕЛЬНОСТИ SQL Servers Exchange Servers Virtualization Servers Switched Gb Ethernet PS6000XV SAS 15k RPM PS6000X SAS 10k RPM PS6000E SATA 7.2k RPM
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44. ВИРТУАЛЬНЫМ СЕРВЕРАМ НУЖНО ВИРТУАЛЬНОЕ ХРАНИЛИЩЕ ДАННЫХ Высокая доступность, возможность планировать простой Расширение ресурсов без остановки сервисов Автоматическая балансировка нагрузки Функционал VMware EqualLogic
45. РАСШИРЕНИЕ РЕСУРСОВ ОНЛАЙН Virtual Machines ESX Server Virtual Machines ESX Server Virtual Machines ESX Server Virtual Machines ESX Server iSCSI SAN SERVERS 3 x servers 6 x processors 48GB RAM STORAGE 2 x PS6000 4GB cache 4 x SP 8 x 1Gb Ethernet 4.6TB SERVERS 4 x servers 8 x processors 64GB RAM STORAGE 3 x PS6000 6GB cache 6 x SP 12 x 1Gb Ethernet 7 TB
46. ВИРТУАЛЬНЫМ СЕРВЕРАМ НУЖНО ВИРТУАЛЬНОЕ ХРАНИЛИЩЕ ДАННЫХ Высокая доступность, возможность планировать простой Расширение ресурсов без остановки сервисов Автоматическая балансировка нагрузки Функционал VMware EqualLogic
47. АВТОМАТИЧЕСКАЯ БАЛАНСИРОВКА НАГРУЗКИ Virtual Machines ESX Server Virtual Machines ESX Server Virtual Machines ESX Server VMware DRS EqualLogic Automatic Load Balancing iSCSI SAN
48. ВИРТУАЛЬНЫМ СЕРВЕРАМ НУЖНО ВИРТУАЛЬНОЕ ХРАНИЛИЩЕ ДАННЫХ Высокая доступность, возможность планировать простой Расширение ресурсов без остановки сервисов Автоматическая балансировка нагрузки Функционал VMware EqualLogic
49. ВЫСОКАЯ ДОСТУПНОСТЬ Virtual Machines ESX Server Virtual Machines ESX Server Virtual Machines ESX Server VMware HA EqualLogic Auto Replication iSCSI SAN
50. ЗАПЛАНИРОВАННЫЙ ПРОСТОЙ Virtual Machines ESX Server Virtual Machines ESX Server Virtual Machines ESX Server VMware Maintenance Mode EqualLogic Evacuation Mode iSCSI SAN
51. ВИРТУАЛЬНЫМ СЕРВЕРАМ НУЖНО ВИРТУАЛЬНОЕ ХРАНИЛИЩЕ ДАННЫХ Автоматическая балансировка нагрузки Расширение ресурсов без остановки сервисов Высокая доступность, возможность планировать простой Функционал VMware EqualLogic
53. ВИРТУАЛИЗИРОВАННОЙ СРЕДЕ ТРЕБУЕТСЯ МНОГОУРОВНЕВАЯ ЗАЩИТА Защита ЦОД Физическая инф.-ра ВМ Данные приложений Защищены Auto Snapshot Manager (ASM) и снэпшотами на массивах Защищена Auto Snapshot Manager (ASM) VMware Edition Защищен VMware HA и PS Series Auto Replication + высочайшая доступность массивов PS Series Защищен VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) и PS Series Auto Replication
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57. КОНСОЛЬ УПРАВЛЕНИЯ DELL Расширение по мере необходимости Различные уровни функциональности — от базовых технологий управления оборудованием (бесплатная версия) до гораздо более комплексных решений (за счет дополнительно подключаемых модулей) Простота и удобство Одна удобная консоль управления вместо множества сложных проприетарных средств Гибкость и открытость Гибкая открытая архитектура, значительно облегчающая интеграцию в уже существующие среды Поддержка разнородных сред Поддержка оборудования не только Dell, но и других поставщиков, включая серверы, клиентские ПК, системы хранения, сетевые устройства и т.д.
58. ИНТЕЛЛЕКТУАЛЬНЫЙ ЦОД – СРЕДСТВО РЕШЕНИЯ ИТ - ЗАДАЧ Минимальный простой Простота установки и управления ИНТЕЛЛЕКТУАЛЬНЫЙ ЦОД ASM Репликация Блейд-серверы Виртуализация Equallogic
M1000e is a great virtualization server platform. But how about the ideal storage virtualization platform. Well, lets start of taking a brief look at common challenges around virtualization storage.
At the same time, tremendous growth is occurring around us. Data is being generated at a faster and faster rate. In 2003 Over 3 Exabytes of data were created. Last year it was more than 161 Exabytes. And we will have a six fold increase in the next four years. This data is coming at us from all directions: YouTube hosts 100 million video streams a day. People share more than 1 billion songs a day over the Internet.London's 200 traffic surveillance cameras send 64 trillion bits a day to its command data center. And Chevron, as an example, accumulates ~ 2 terabytes of data per day. To compound these issues even further, new compliance regulations -- such as SOX, HIPAA and the Data Protection Act (DPA) -- are forcing IT organizations to store data for longer periods of time or suffer severe penalties. Growth presents many challenges and data storage is just one of them. 10/15/09 Confidential to Dell Msd_pac_oct_2007
Note, this is a build slide with the large challenges under the gray area.
In the last 60 min or so we have been trying to show you, layer for layer, how virtualization, blades and EqualLogic empowers each other – many times solving the same problems and offering the same benefits but from different angles, and in doing so completing each other – creating a far larger sum of benefits when coming together than each individual part would make up.
With Dell blades, running VMware virtualization software and SRM you get full server virtualization. And with the built in Cisco-switches supporting switch virtualization in combination with FlexAddress connection virtualization the layer between servers and storage is virtualized. And finally EqualLogic PS-series virtualization storage completing the solution. Together they offer complete datacenter wide virtualization – with all resources being virtualized bringing the benefits of virtualization to your entire datacenter. Giving you an Intelligent datacenter that is: Self monitoring Self-tuning Self healing Dynamically adaptable Intelligently protected Seamlessly scalable Energy Efficient Cost effective And you can get it today. Next we are to take a look at these products in real-life in our demo session.
Before taking a look at the ideal virtualization server platform lets set the scene by taking a look at what common challenges virtualization servers experience. When virtualizing, and moving from many servers using 5 – 10% of the processing power, to fewer better utilized servers the expectation was to get to a 80 – 90% utilization. However as many of you probably already know this has not been the case. The average load on physical virtualization hosts today are usually rarely above 30 - 40%. And the major reason for this is MEMEORY CONSTRAINTS. The server runs out of memory long before the processors are working at 100%. Hence the promise of 80 – 90% utilization ratios have been very difficult to reach. But not only the processor utilization becomes low also, and just as important, the utilization of the investment in the Hypervisor software becomes low. But even if you could add more memory new constraints occurs on I/O network capacity. Because when doubling the memory the I/O-needs to be able to scale otherwise you are just moving one bottleneck from one place to another. On top of this, installing new physical virtualization hosts are often complicated involving everything from simple tasks like racking and cabling to more complex and time consuming tasks like setting up SAN storage. Now these are just a couple of common challenges experienced in server virtualization environments. We will now take a look at a platform we believe can solve these and many more server virtualization challenges – and that is blade servers!
But before going into blades and their benefits for virtualization lets take a look at the core general benefits of blades. Space – blades take up considerably less space since the blade servers share several components inside the chassi enclosure. Also, no extra space is needed for switches and KVM since these are also built-in to the chassi. And last but not least – the cable reduction is substantial with up to 90% fewer cables. Faster deployment and easier mgmt – you get single interface for inventory and monitoring of both blade servers and the enclosure components and when buying new servers no racking or cabling is needed meaning quicker and easier deployment. Power and cooling – blade servers consume significantly less power compared to traditional rack servers – again due to sharing several power consuming components in the chassi – this also means less cooling needed (but the right cooling since blades means less heat in total but a lot of heat in a smaller area). All these together offers lower Total Cost of Ownership helping you run your datacenter faster, better and smarter. These general benefits are valid for most blade solutions on the market including Dells latest blade solution – but as you are about to find out, Dell blades offer a lot more…
Introducing the Dell M-series blade solution. In December 2007 Dell launched the new M1000e blade solution. Dells largest research investment ever with over 54 000 man hours in R&D and over 30 patents filed. It is the most modern large scale blade solution on the market and since it was launched slightly later than its competitors the development team at Dell had the time to see the growth of virtualization – and thereby had the time to make several key implementations that truly empowers virtualization. But first, lets take an overview of the M1000e. M1000 enclosure 16 half-height blades or 8 full-height blades in a market leading power efficient 10U-chassi. Blade servers Offering two half-height 2-way general usage blade servers running Intel (M610) or AMD(M605)-processors. Adding to that 3 x full-height virtualization blades the M805 (AMD 2-way) and M905 (AMD 4-way) and the newly released M710 virtualization optimized Intel based full height 2s blade. I/O-modules A very comprehensive and modular switch portfolio with Ethernet switches from the Dell Power Connect range as well as Cisco. Fibre channel switches from Brocade. And for HPC-clusters, very high-performance Infiniband switches from Cisco. And of course for those who have a switch infrastructure already in place – Ethernet or Fibre Channel Pass Through switches. Management Offering market leading local and remote management thru integrated chassi mgmt controllers, Drac-blade server controllers, integrated KVM-options and Front LCD. All in all an extremely well designed and future proof blade solution. Next lets take a closer look at the back of the chassi.
At the back of the chassi is where a lot of the core components of a blade solution can be found. Critical components that are shared between the blade servers in the front. And this sharing of components is one of the key explanations to the benefits of blade server. Lets take a look at all the components in the back one at the time. Chassis Management Controller (CMC) Provides redundant , secure access paths for IT-administrators to manage multiple enclosures and blades from a single console making the M1000e one of the easiest blade solutions to manage Integrated KVM (iKVM) Provides easy access thru existing KVM- infrastructure down to each blade server 9 x High-Efficiency Fans Distributed evenly across chassis to support zoned cooling thru independent air flow paths and individual fan speeds controlled by the CMC. 6 x High-Efficiency Power Supplies With +91% conversion efficiency and Dynamic Engagement to keep energy consumption at a minimum without sacrificing redundancy 6 x redundant I/0-modules 6 x redundant I/O-modules using 3 x high-speed fabrics. Supports Ethernet, Fibre Channel and Infiniband switches from Dell, Cisco and Brocade.
In September of 2008 Dell launched the industries first virtualization optimized blade servers – built from the ground up to deliver maximum virtualization performance and scalability. And they do deliver. No other blade servers on the market has the same memory or I/O-capacity (for 2-way and 4-way full-height blades). They deliver market leading performance / watt and price / performance and pure virtualization performance. Lets take a look at each individually. Adding to that on March 25 th 2009 Dell launched the latest addition to our virtualization optimized blades line-up with the PowerEdge M710. Together these 3 blade servers completely change the game for virtualization on blades. 1 Based on available specification of HP and IBM servers on www.hp.com and www.ibm.com 2 Assumes average of 2GB of memory per VM; assumes I/O throughput does not constrain VM count; Dell vs HP comparable configurations of PowerEdge M905 and ProLiant BL685c G5. Dell & HP configurations include: 4x quad-core 8347HE processors; No O/S; Diskless; 3 Year 4-HR support. List price as configured: $15.9K (same price for either Dell or HP systems. 3 Based on SPECjbb2005 performance per watt analysis by Principled Technologies, SPECjbb2005 Performance and Power Consumption, August 2008. 4 Based results published on Nov 10 th at http://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/results.html
First out the newly launched M710, 2-way Intel based full-height blade. The most powerful 2-way blade virtualization server in the world (2-way full-height blade) as of March 30 th The perfect Intel virtualization blade for mainstream virtualization solution. With 18 memory slots and up to 144GB RAM it delivers more virtual servers / blade and per hypervisor license cost than any other 2-socket blade server in the market place. And to cope with the additional memory, I/O-capacity is also doubled with 4 x integrated NIC and 4 x I/O-slots for network cards supporting in total up to 12 I/O-connections. And with market unique built-in Hypervisor on SD-flash-memory you can get a virtualization solution completely without hard drives – further increasing reliability and reducing power consumption. The ideal blade virtualization solution for customers looking for maximum performance / processor / memory slot with the I/O-performance to support it.
This is actually a common misconception that has never been true. As you can see, for an average virtualization solution, blades actually takes up less space. And that is with additional room for growth in the chassi without taking up more space in the rack.
Again an opinion that is no longer true with the Dell virtualization optimized blade line-up. As you can see, the M710 offers the same amount of memory as the industry leading rack counterpart R710.
Again - as you can see – the M710 offers the exact same I/O capacity as the R710.
Why do you virtualize to begin with? The 4 major reasons for virtualizing are: Increase Datacenter Consolidation. That is do more with less. (Read thru the 3 points for each) Increase ease of mgmt and deployment. (Read thru the 3 points for each) Reduce Downtime. (Read thru the 3 points for each) Reduce resources needed for power and cooling. (Read thru the 3 points for each) This is probably pretty clear to most of you. The question is, how would blade servers stack up against those four core benefits of virtualization?
Blades are great for Datacenter consolidation. With market leading Dense Form Factor supporting up to 16 servers on 10U. That is up to 32 processors and 128 cores in one chassi. Divided by U you get 3.2 processors /U and 12.8 cores per U. 60% more processing power per U compared to a traditional 1U-rack server. Increased I/O Bandwidth – is critical for datacenter consolidation – and with 8 x High-speed ports (up to 80Gb/s per port) per blade and 4 x Gb-ports I/O bandwidth will not be a limiting factor. And with Dell being the first to offer end-to-end (from I/O-cards to switches) 10GbE and FC8 blade solutions you future growth is secure. And last but not least, market unique Flex I/O-modules offers the possibility to scale your switches cost effectively by adding ports and functionality thru switch upgrade modules Market leading blade Memory Capacity is a key datacenter consolidation enabler. With a maximum of 192 DIMMs and 1536GB RAM in total for the full chassi and with individual blades offering as much as 24 DIMMs and 192GB RAM your memory density is thru the roof. You get 19.2 DIMMs per U and 153.6GB RAM per U – that is 140% more than a traditional 1U-rack server. So when it comes to datacenter consolidation – blades are the perfect match for virtualization .
Blades are all about simplifying management and deployment. This is realized thru: Improved Management Options Management is significantly simplified with blades, the M1000e has redundant Centralized Management Controllers for a single, secure interface for managing and monitoring the enclosure and all components. Being able to manage the enclosure, servers, Ethernet and Fibre Channel I/O, power supplies, KVM, etc. all from a single console makes all these components as easy to manage as an individual server. And since the CMCs offers stacking functionality several chassis can be connected and managed as one. And with individual iDRACs per blade full remote management of individual servers is built-in. Optional iKVM for connection to existing KVM-infrastructure simplifies mgmt when physically in the datacenter. Chassi front LCD offers deployment wizard and chassis health status for including Chassis, blade, & I/O module information & alerts. And last but not least, the new Dell Management Console offers a single pane of glass for full monitoring, inventory and patch mgmt not only for all blade servers in the chassi but also rack-servers. And it integrates monitoring and management of your entire IT-infrastructure from servers, switches and storage to printers notebooks and desktops. And it works with non-Dell hardware too! All thru a single-pane of glass using the same interface. More on DMC on later slides. I/O-virtualization. With Cisco Virtual Blade Switch capability several Cisco switches can be connected and virtualized and thereby treated as one big switch offering simplified management, virtualization of Ethernet ports for integration into any fabric, consolidated uplinks and lower TCO. Simplified Deployment · Blades enable simplified server deployment, only an enclosure needs to be mounted in a rack for 16 x blade servers; then blades are simply plugged into the enclosure within seconds. Compare this to 16 x 1U servers that each need to be mounted and cabled in a rack. · Blades require less cabling infrastructure, up to 90% less cabling than 1U servers which helps to simplify deployment and lower infrastructure costs. And once chassi is set up, no additional cabling is needed when installing new servers. As you can see, ease of mgmt and deployment is one of the major strengths of blade servers.
Dell blades reduced downtime thru: FLEXADRESS offers connectivity “virtualization” this means it virtualizes the layer between the server and the switch simplifying blade network management and minimizing downtime by centrally providing network and storage addresses to slots instead of blades. This is done thru the CMC, assigning WWN/MAC values to blade slots in place of factory-assigned blade WWN/MAC Allows for blades to be swapped without affecting FC SAN Zoning, iSCSI zoning, or any MAC-dependent functions SD card is provisioned inside CMC with a UNIQUE pool of 208 MACs and 64 WWNs SD card is inserted into the CMC at Dell Factory or APOS – SD card is now tied to that specific chassis User-configurable to enable iSCSI MAC, Ethernet MAC, and/or WWN Persistence Works with any switch even Pass Through and comes at a fraction of the cost compared to the competition. This means, losing a blade server, you will be up and running much faster since once replaced you will not need to redo SAN Zonings etc Fully Redundant solution. Offering 3 fully redundant (in total 6) switch fabrics for communication. Adding to that all critical chassi components are redundant, from CMC to cooling fans and power supplies. Rip & Replace functionally offers dramatically quicker replacements of failed servers. By just sliding in a new blade in the old slot. Dell/Altiris Rip and Replace functionally will load a pre-set image onto the new blade, and with FlexAddress no additional storage zoning etc. is required shortening downtime substantially.
Dell blade servers are market leading when it comes to reducing the power and cooling needed. This shows in: Our market leading Efficient PSUs with 91% power efficiency this means very little energy go to waste, and thereby reducing excess heat that needs to be cooled. And with Dynamic Power Supply Engagement power supplies are put online/offline, automatically as needed – further reducing power consumption and increasing power efficiently. Super Effective cooling Fans based on technology from the aerospace industry together with zoned cooling technology and independent air-flow paths cooling could not be more efficient. This means not only reducing the need for power and cooling but also servers that are not running hot and thereby failing. The Dell M1000e cooling fans are unmatched among blade competitors (check http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y3zWzMuiU8 for real-world examples). All together this means Dell M1000e offers Best-in-class Power efficiency . Independent test by Principled Technologies shows M1000e using significantly less energy per blade compared to the HP/IBM at every configuration. And not only that, at the same time delivering more performance / watt at every configuration. And last but not least, M1000e is the only blade solution on the market completely fee of lead. Making it the only truly GREEN blade solution.
Centralized storage, or SANs, is key enabler for virtualization. SAN storage have many advantages but historically also some challenges. Network infrastructure. Traditionally most centralized storage used in virtualization environments are based on dedicated high-performance FC-networks. This has been great for performance and reliability but at the same time expensive to buy and scale and complex and time consuming to set-up, own and manage. Data Protection. Most storage arrays on the market today are quite expensive as is – but when adding advanced functionalities for data protection and disaster recovery pricing usually goes thru the roof. Many very useful virtualization features such as Snapshot technology comes at extra charge. And for true disaster recovery protection Replication and/or mirror functionality is needed, usually with a substantial additional cost involved. Troublesome Management. While FC-storage is offering reliability and high performance changes and performance tuning is both complex and time consuming often requiring professional services help Non-virtualized storage resources. Storage resources are separated and “frame based” with each frame supporting its own attached disk enclosures. Each “frame” is treated as a separate entity with no cooperation or knowledge of other “frames”. Causing pooling of storage with increased management complexity and no dynamic sharing of resources.
In a traditional virtualization environment where storage recourses are not virtualized the scaling of your environment is not optimal. Look at this example. As you add a physical server host you add resources (in the form of processing power, memory and I/O-capacity). These new resources benefit ALL virtual servers, either by being moved to this new physical host or by resources being freed up as other virtual servers are being moved to the new physical host. This is one of the biggest advantages with server virtualization– your are virtualizing the layer between application / virtual server and the hardware resources – hence the hardware resources are one big virtualized pool of computing power for your datacenter. Unfortunately this is not the case with traditional storage. As you add storage you either are just adding additional storage capacity, hence no processing power is being added. Or if you are adding an entirely new storage array for added processing power this new array will be an isolated storage pool. So as you scale you environment the server resources are virtualized and pooled as one big pool of power while the storage is still scaled as several isolated storage pools. Wouldn't it be great of all those storage resources could be virtualized in the same way as server resources. So as you add storage resources you are adding processing power, cache memory and storage capacity into one pig pool of storage power. Storage power that all storage volumes would benefit from. And what if you could manage this entire storage resources pool as ONE. Well, that is exactly what storage virtualization is all about. And that is exactly what Dell EqualLogic PS-series offers.
The architects of the Dell EqualLogic PS Series rethought storage from the ground up, taking smart principles from elsewhere in the computing world and applied them to the product. Virtualization, IP networking, page-based data movement are a few examples. Beyond technology design, also rethought the business principles that make buying, expanding and improving traditional shared storage difficult and painful. The result is a storage experience that impresses product reviewers and award judges as you can see here, but more importantly empowers and delights customers. What you get with EqualLogic storage is simply more storage at better performance with greater protection and increased flexibility – but without the management complexity usually present in external storage solutions.
Before moving on to how EqualLogic empowers virtualization lets take a look at the physical hardware. And the physical hardware is all about performance and reliability. Fully redundant & hot swappable components ensure 99.999% availability. This goes for everything from the dual storage controllers to cooling fans and power supplies. And the form factor is either 3Us and 16 drivers (controllers and drives in the same enclosure, no “frame” based technology) or 4Us and 48 (!!!)-drives. How do you fit 48-drives on 4Us?? Well by being innovative – look at the picture on the right and see how Dell EqualLogic literally turns external storage on its head by mounting drives from the top and not the front. Of course they are still hot-plug but you have to slide out the array from the rack. High-end components – 4 x 1Gb network interfaces per storage controller for maximum performance and reliability. Enterprise-class drives to fit you needs. From high-capacity SATA (7.2k) to high-performance 10k and 15k SAS and Ultra High Performance Solid State Drives you will be able to build a tiered storage infrastructure to support varying application needs. Of course with battery-backed and mirrored cache at 2GB per controller. Enclosure monitoring system . With a built in sophisticated monitoring system the entire storage enclosure is monitored. Constantly checking component and disk drive status as well as temperatures – to give you the needed info to take pro-active action.
The PS-series are divided into to 4 specific models, all offering the same great functionality and reliability and mainly differing in drive capacity and drive speed. The PS6000S The PS6000XV offering maximum performance with 15k drives and up to 7.2TB of storage. The PS5000X only differs on the drive speed, 10k. The PS5000E is the high-capacity version offering up to 16TB of 7.2k SATA-drives. And then at the end of the scale, or top of the scale, depending on how you view it we have the huge capacity PS5500E offering 48 x 7.2k SATA drives for up to 48TB of storage. Now the beauty of all this is you can mix and match these arrays anyway you want up to 12 arrays and 576TB – but with the built-in storage virtualization you can always manage them as ONE big virtualized and tiered storage array. Other innovative features you get with a virtualized storage array: Linear scalability – The PS-series offers true linear scalability of BOTH performance and capacity. (shown later in the presentation) Hands-off Management – The PS-series is a true “set-it-and-forget-it” intelligent storage array. That once set-up will manage it-self. Intelligent self optimization – The PS-series offers a market unique ability to automatically optimize the storage performance to fit application needs. This is done thru automatic load balancing over disks, RAID-sets, connections, cache, controllers and arrays. (shown later in the presentation) All inclusive functionality – All advanced software capabilities, like Snapshot and Replication, always comes included in the price – offering no hidden-costs. In a couple of minutes we will take a closer look at a couple of these unique features. But first –doesn't all this sound almost too good to be true? Well it isn't. customers using the EqualLogic arrays are simply astound.
Mix and match drive capacity and performance profiles to meet your business needs, by Department, Application, or Physical Location This shows by application. Group members are managed, accessed, and appear as a single storage system Members can have the same or different RAID configurations (R5, R6, R50, R10) Volumes (LUNs) can be moved from Pool to Pool or different members on the fly with no interruption in service Keep most data on the least expensive disk prioritize the most important data on the most expensive disk Tier 1 – 1.6 TB raw Tier 2 – 21.6 TB raw Tier 3 – 44.8 raw Tier 4 – 144 TB raw
The PS4000 Series are new EqualLogic PS Series arrays designed for the remote/branch office and SMB, providing easy administration, enterprise software and virtualized architecture at an affordable price. PS40000 includes all the enterprise class features and tools extended to the remote office and SMB at no additional costs Helps eliminate “hidden costs” that customers experience with competitors Helps simplify the purchasing cycle No forklift upgrades or data-in-place migrations that cost money and time
And this shows in the extraordinary customer satisfaction EQL-users show. In a recent study 98% of surveyed customers said they would recommend EqualLogic to others. A unique customer satisfaction result – only achievable if the products live up to the promise.
PLEASE NOTE RESULTS BASED ON PS5000 – PS6000 OFFERS APPROX 30% MORE PERFORMANCE A common question is how would iSCSI hold up against FC on performance in a virtualization environment. Well historically it has been established in several studies that on average iSCSI offers similar performance to FC on random access but lower performance on large sequential data transfers. Since virtualization applications almost always uses a random access pattern to storage iSCSI is a perfect match for virtualization. But to Dell iSCSI is only the connectivity – just as important is how you implement it and how you design your hardware to make the most out of it. And to prove it we asked the independent research company Principled Technologies to put our PS5000XV up against the HP EVA 4400 system in a VMware virtualization load test. In the test a specific virtual server running heavy load Exchange 2007 was created for VMware ESX. A specific response time was designated as acceptable. Then as many of those virtual servers as possible where loaded on a physical host until the system reached the designated acceptable response time. And the results where very interesting. The PS5000 was able to support 24 virtual servers vs. 18 for the HP EVA 4400. That is 33% more. And this was using the exact same type (146Gb 15k SAS) and the exact same number of drives (32). And when talking performance it is important to understand the implications “frame”-based technology has vs. EqualLogic PS-series. Since a “frame”-based solution has a fixed amount of processing power and I/O-capacity performance will degraded as you scale capacity – as you soon will see – this is not the case with EqualLogic. So it might be that FC offers slightly better performance at 15 drives and one enclosure – but as you scale to 2 or 3 enclosures the story is usually completely different. Next we will take a look at a couple of the unique features the virtualized PS-series offers.
The Dell EqualLoigc PS-series arrays uses iSCSI for connectivity to servers. iSCSI offers several key benefits for virtual infrastructures. Simplifies Networked Storage iSCSI uses much more affordable hardware –using standard Ethernet switches and low-cost standard Ethernet cards instead of expensive FC switches and HBAs. Another important benefit is you can use it with existing network infrastructure and existing network knowledge – with no additional trading needed. Enhances Consolidation ROI Setting up and installing new virtualization environments becomes a lot easier and can usually be done without professional service assist. Things like using exiting network infrastructure cuts cost and ease installation. And when scaling the network infrastructure for application data the network infrastructure for the iSCSI-storage data is scaled too. Acquisition cost and mgmt is kept to minimum with standard based hardware and unified mgmt tools. Enables a Simple Virtualized Storage Architecture Since iSCSI Natively supports virtualization deployment and management of virtual servers are dramatically simplified. iSCSI talks directly to the application server (virtual server) with no need to go thru the Hypervisor (needed with FC). This means no advanced FC LUN-design etc. is needed, instead you create a storage volume in the EQL-array and then the virtual server operating system (like Windows) can detect it – with no management or set-up needed in the physical host. This enables scalable, flexible networked storage grid implementations that supports load balances across several storage resources. OK – so iSCSI has a lot of benefits for virtualization – but how about performance?
PLEASE NOTE RESULTS BASED ON PS5000 – PS6000 OFFERS APPROX 30% MORE PERFORMANCE Based on a Principled Technologies report commissioned by Dell, “Exchange 2007 SAN Performance Test: Comparing performance between Dell EqualLogic PS Series SAN and HP Storage Works 4400 Enterprise Virtual Array.” Dell iSCSI SAN configuration: Dell PowerEdge 2950 Server, Dell PowerConnect 5448 Switch, and two fully populated drive shelves (16 disks per shelf). HP Fiber Channel SAN configuration: Dell PowerEdge 2950 Server, Brocade 200E Fiber Channel switch, and two fully populated drive shelves (12 disks per shelf). With enterprise storage, how clever the software is in optimizing how physical disks are used makes a large difference in how much useful work you can get out of each disk. Because of differences in vendor software, two solutions that have the same physical disks do not provide equal ability to support user requirements. We believe that is why Microsoft couldn’t develop a simple rule of thumb to tell you how many disks of what speed you need to support how many users. Instead Microsoft developed a test simulation and made recommendations on how to run it to validate how well the storage can meet your anticipated needs. We used the Microsoft’s tests in the way Microsoft recommends to see how much load the EVA4400 we had, which had 24 15Krpm disks in it, could deliver while keeping response time below the 20ms limit required to keep users happy. We used the same server setup to test 32 disks of EqualLogic storage. Since EqualLogic had more disks, the relevant comparison was not total IO but rather IO per disk. The IO per disk for EqualLogic was 86% higher than the IO per disk for EVA. Exact IOPS/disk was 111.9 for the HP EVA and 208.4 for EqualLogic. Had the EVA been configured with additional disks, the IO per disk would likely have remained nearly constant for a time but then started declining more noticeably as the decreasing amount of controller memory, cache, and processing power available per disk drive that had to be optimized. EqualLogic’s grid scaling architecture allows additional controllers to be added and load balanced as additional disks are added, so that the ability to optimize disk activity does not decline as the configuration grows. Because EqualLogic’s architecture allowed for there to always be plenty of controller processing power, EqualLogic was able to design software that relies on those extra resources to better optimize disk activity. So even if you don’t need to scale to large levels, you benefit from EqualLogic’s architecture by getting more useful IO out of each disk you purchase.
PLEASE NOTE THE USE OF THE WORD ACTIVE FOR CACHE AND ETHERNET PORTS – SINCE EQL IS ACTIVE/PASSIVE – ONLY ONE OF THE CONTROLLERS CACHE AND PORTS ARE IN USE AT ONE TIME – OFFERING A REDUNDAT SOLUTION WITH PERFORMANCE LEVELS INTACT – VS AN ACTIVE/ACTIVE SOLUTION WHERE PERFORMANCE IS REDUCED BY 50% IF A CONTROLLER FAILS One of the key features of EqualLogic storage arrays is the possibility to do online linear scalability of performance and capacity. So, what does that exactly mean. Well online scalability, that is scalability without downtime is quite common on most enterprise class storage arrays. It is when we add the words performance and linear that is gets interesting. Take a look at the picture on the right – as you can see we have a pretty common server environment with a single EqualLogic PS6000XV. On the top left we have the storage resources available for the entire server environment at this time. As you can see the Free storage Space is running out so we need to add more storage. So what do we do – well we add any new PS-array, could be SATA could be SAS, could be 10k, 15k or even SSD. As we add it the entire pool of storage grows without downtime. Now you are thinking, how would that differ from any storage array – well when adding a storage enclosure to a normal “frame” based storage array your capacity grows and you can, normally do it without downtime. However your overall storage resources don´t change, only the capacity. With EQL – as you can see – ALL storage resources are scaled, linear. So you now have 2 x PS5000XV, and 4 x Storage processors and 4GB of active cache, 8 x active Ethernet-ports and of course 14.4Tb of storage. So all resources scale linear – this means no performance penalties occur, on the contrary you actually boost the performance of you your entire storage pool. And as discussed on the previous slide on performance – this is key when scaling your storage environment. This is ONLINE, LINEAR scalability of PERFORMANCE and CAPACITY. But does it really work?
So this sounds great but does it work in real life? We had the independent research company, VeriTest, do a test for us. We scaled from 1 x PS5000 to 5 x PS5000 and as you can see the IOPS-throughput scales completely linear.
Automatic Load Balancing is exactly what it sound like. The ability for the storage array to intelligently balance load over more than one array. In this example we are adding a new storage array to an existing environment. Once connected, by the way – it takes approx 10 min to set up an EQL-storage array – the new PS-array will communicate with the existing one. And based on historical I/O-load-patterns, measured within the storage controllers, volumes will be moved from the old array to the new. Please note that this is NOT done randomly, but intelligently and based on real-world I/O-load-patterns. So all you need to do to scale your storage environment, both from a capacity and performance perspective, is to add a new array. The rest is done automatically.
Once your storage arrays are up and running they will continue to manage themselves automatically optimizing performance to fit application needs. In this example a virtualization server has a storage volume on a high-capacity PS6000E array running SATA-drives. Now, even though it appears to be 3 separate storage arrays since they are virtualized they are managed and run as ONE. This means I/O- performance measurements occur constantly on all arrays, thru all controllers. In this example the I/O-traffic to the virtualization volume receives a big jump in I/O-access. The slow SATA-drives have difficulties keeping up. Now, what happens is, based on the real-world, real-time measurements, the volume will be moved to where it will get sufficient I/O. Once analyzed, the volume is moved, automatically and online without downtime to the faster PS6000XV and its 15k drives. This type of performance optimization is done not only based on drive speed and drive type but on RAID-level, cache usage and I/O-port and storage controller load – all to optimize the performance of the storage volumes to fit application needs. PLEASE NOTE – YOU CAN OF COURSE SET POLICIES FOR THIS IF YOU DO NOT WANT IT TO HAPPEN – BUT MOST CUSTOMERS LEAVE IT UP TO THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE SYSTEM CASUE IT WORKS REALLY GREAT!
Multi-Path I/O an often costly add-on to storage environments comes pre-bundles with all EQL-arrays. It offers a great way to improve performance and reliability. By utilizing all existing connections from a server to a storage volume bandwidth is increased substantially – and if one of these connections would fail you now have several backup connections for redundancy – eliminating single-point of failures. This is very useful for a lot of different applications including virtualization where the need for both performance and reliability is present. And with numerous virtual servers connecting to the storage array at the same time you want to make sure you utilize all existing connections.
Another advanced feature included is the Auto-Snapshot Manager that helps you take point-in-time copies of data – for simplifying backup and restore. And it comes with full support and integration with VMware for automated and consolidated backup and recovery of Virtual Machines. An extremely powerful and high-performance feature that frees up the physical virtualization host from these tasks and thereby avoiding performance penalties when doing Virtual machine backup.
Another unique feature of the PS-series is the all-inclusive feature set. This means all advanced features are included in the price – independent of PS-model. One important such advanced feature is the PS Series Auto-replication functionality – offering SAN replication at no additional cost. This is usually a very costly add-on in competitive solutions. Replicate volumes to remote sites over any distance The PS-series Auto Replication is great protection solution. Offering the possibility to replicate volumes from one PS-array to another (independent of PS-model) ideally placed in a remote site. And since all communication is done over IP this can be done over practically any distance. It is extremely easy to configure and set-up. And with very quick recovery of volumes a much higher level of availability can be achieved. And compared to legacy host based replication the Auto-Replication has no impact whatsoever on application performance. And with full integration with VMware it offers hypervisor aware replication and integration with Virtual Center / SRM for complete disaster recovery solutions (more about this later in the presentation). Address varying needs through flexible configurations It is important to understand that though it comes bundled as part of the storage array it is a fully featured Enterprise class replication solution. With advanced features such as: Multiple recovery points efficiently stored Per-volume replication schedules for varying service levels Fast failback to primary site by synchronizing block-level delta’s 1-way, bi-directional, or many-to-one replication Move replication delegated space between pools Space-efficient thin replicas
Thin provisioning offers a new level of “Buy-as-you-grow-storage” and it comes at not extra cost – no licenses or keys. With Thin Provisioning you can reserve storage volumes to a server (virtual of physical) that is larger than it actually is using – this mean you server will think it has more storage than it actually has – but as it starts to use this reserved storage it automatically gets space added to follow the usage. This way you do not need to allocate huge amount of storage to a server just because you think it will needed it in the future – hence you do not need to buy the storage either before it is needed – instead it will automatically be increased as the need arises offering you the possibility to buy-as-you-grow. EqualLogic Thin Provisioning is extremely easy to use and offers simplifying features like automatic space addition, simple to use warnings and notifications. It also offers the possibility to transition volumes to and fraom thin and classic in case you need or storage strategy changes. It is a perfect tool for a Disaster Recovery implementation since you can use thin provisioning on mirrored sites too – further saving storage space. All in all this really simplifies day-to-day storage management and removes the need for advancing capacity planning wichi often turns into a difficult guessing game.
Performance monitoring and analysing is becoming a more and more important tool to keep up with performance levels in the datacenter – but it is also becoming more and more difficult to keep up with. Several products exist in the market place, all being costly additions to you storage array. With EqualLogic, as always, this functionality is bundled in with the EqualLogic SAN HQ-solution. A comprehensive and easy to use centralized event monitoring tool that constantly gathers capacity and performance data from your entire EqualLogic environment. It offers not only detailed performance reporting on IOPS, latency, network etc. but also intelligent trend analysis that helps you take pro-active action. It is extremely easy to use and install.
OK so now we have covered the basics and features of the EqualLogic PS-series and you should by now have a good understanding of this amazing product. Next it is time to take a closer look on how EqualLogic PS-series features can benefit virtualization environments. Or simply how Server Virtualization and Storage Virtualization works together. So lets take a look a THREE core features you get with virtualization and how those features are implemented in VMware and EqualLogic respectively and how they together create a better datacenter environment. Online expansion of resources Automatic workload balancing High Availability and planned downtime Lets start of taking a look at Online Expansion of resources.
We have 3 physical severs with a total resource pool of 6 processors and 48GB RAM running 12 virtual servers. As you can see, adding a new physical server host in VMWare is possible online without downtime. We have boosted the performance of the entire server virtualization environment from 3 servers, 6 processors and 48GB RAM to 4 x servers, 8 processors and 64GB RAM. Your virtualized server resource pool is now bigger and more powerful. And for all virtual servers to benefit from the added resources we can now move virtual servers online to the new host, thereby offering more performance to all virtual servers. Lets take a look at the storage. We have 2 x PS6000, 4 processors (2 active and 2 passive – but cache mirroring is active between them to support immediate failover), 4GB cache (again active cache you also 4GB passive cache receiving mirroring from the active ones) 8 x 1Gb Ethernet (active ports – you also have 8 passive redundant ports) and 4.6TB of storage. We add a new storage array and as you can see it is done online without downtime. We have now boosted our entire virtualized storage pool to 3 x PS6000, 6 x SP, 6GB cache, 12 x 1Gb Ethernet and 7TB of storage. And once installed we can move volumes to the new array without downtime – thereby making sure the added performance and capacity resources come to use for all volumes. And with new resources available we can increase the size of our storage volumes and add new virtual servers. Again, on both sides online without downtime. By the way, increasing the size of an EqualLogic storage volume is done in a minute and do not require complex and time consuming META-LUNs. The important thing to understand is that by virtualizing both server and storage resources we can really scale our entire environment in the same logical way. Compared to traditional “frame”-based storage where scaling is only done on capacity without adding processing power or I/O-capacity. This means as you add more storage you risk getting penalty on performance. Also an important factor to point out is the added availability you get with a virtualized, non-”frame”-based, storage architecture like PS-series. In a traditional frame-based architecture you have one processing-frame that you add “passive”-storage enclosures to when scaling. Since all processing power and I/O-interconnect sits in that single frame it becomes very vulnerable. If you lose the frame you lose all storage enclosures. In an EqualLogic architecture all storage “enclosures” has its own processing power and I/O-interconnect, this means losing one isolates the problem to that specific array – all other arrays in that SAN are still running.
So as you can see, VMware and EqualLogic offers the same feature in each virtualization layer. Next, lets take a look at Automatic Workload balancing.
In this case we have an environment with 3 physical servers attached to 2 EqualLogic storage arrays. We have 4 virtual servers running in each physical host and 3 storage volumes running in the EQL-arrays. In all datacenter environments application load varies over time. This is actually one of the fundamentals of virtualization. As application load varies the physical host is able to run several applications. If all applications always peaked at the exact same time performance would be suffering. In this example a virtual server is peaking and receiving a lot of user requests, hence it needs more performance. And usually when an application is receiving a lot of user requests the same goes for the storage volumes it is accessing. So we now have a virtual server needing more performance and a storage volume needing more performance. For the virtual server VMware DRS (Dynamic Resource Scheduler) comes to rescue. DRS monitors server loads and makes intelligent decisions on how to balance loads. In this case to free up performance resources DRS moves away two of the virtual servers to the other physical hosts. Thereby giving the peaking virtual sever the performance resources it needed. But this only solves the problem on the server side, how about the peaking storage volume? Well for this we have EqualLogic Automatic Load Balancing. Since the EqualLogic arrays monitors I/O-requests to volumes it senses the increased load on the red volume. It also senses that the load on the other array is low. So to free up resources it moves the yellow volume, online without downtime, to the other array. And by doing so frees up storage processing power, cache usage and I/O-port capacity for the red volume that is now able to cope with the increased I/O-access. Now the beauty with all this is that it is done INTELLIGENTLY and AUTOMATICALLY with no hands-on management.
So EQL and VMware offers automatic workload balancing that works great together to make sure your applications are getting needed resources to keep service levels – and all this with you not even needing to worry about it. How about high-availability and dealing with planned down time?
Lets start with High availability. One of the core reasons for customers choosing to virtualize is improved availability. So lets take a look at an example. Luckily quite uncommon, but still happening servers do fail without notice. And when they do you immediately lose all services / applications running in that server. Now it is very costly to protect your servers from complete server failure, traditionally the only way has been to make a complete dedicated cluster to another server. If you are to do that for your entire server environment you will need to double your server numbers. But, since most applications can handle a couple of minutes downtime finding a solution that has them back-up and running within minutes is usually enough and virtualization offers just that in a very cost-effective way. In the example we have 3 physical hosts connected to a single EQL-array. Suddenly one of the physical hosts go down without notice, all virtual servers running inside are lost. But since they all reside inside the EQL-storage array, VMware HA-functionality restarts them, automatically on other physical hosts, where room is available. This happens within minutes and is usually enough protection for the average application. And this functionality comes at no extra cost in VMware ESX Enterprise. What if the same thing would happen to your EqualLogic array? Well first of all bear in mind that you EQL-array offers 99,999% availability and has all critical components redundant and hot-plug, so this happening is extremely rare. Still it could happen and since the storage array is critical for the entire server pool it is big problem if it happens. So the question is how do you protect yourself. Well for that there is EqualLogic Auto Replication. By adding a secondary PS-array you can use Auto-Replication to replicate all volumes of the storage array to a secondary “backup” array. And once set-up, if you would lose you primary array – all you need to do is move the traffic form the virtualization servers to the new array, very little work is needed since you are using iSCSI all resources are visible and connected thru the same network. So within minutes you would be up and running again. And again, this functionality comes at NO extra cost and is built into all PS-arrays. Also, this secondary array could be any PS-array, using slower more cost-effective drives since a slight performance drop is usually ok in an emergency. And if you don´t want to have a “cold” array just sit and wait for something that most likely never will happen you could use both arrays in production. Dividing the volumes between each and then use Auto-replication to replicate volumes in both directions. This means if you lose an array half of the volumes would still be running and the rest will be online within minutes thru Auto-replication.
A majority of downtime in datacenters are actually planned downtime – that is downtime that is not happening due to an emergency but due to maintenance. In most datacenters this type of maintenance downtime needs to occur in late evenings or during the night when the applications are not used BUT even this is getting more and more difficult in the global online economy were room for planned downtime often has been reduced to zero. In the server virtualization layer this is managed by VMware Maintenance Mode. With this you can tell a physical host to enter “Maintenance mode”, when doing so the host will check with other physical hosts to see where available room exists. It will then move all virtual servers to one or several other physical hosts in the virtualized pool. This is done online, automatically and without downtime. You can now do whatever maintenance the physical host needed, and you can do it during normal working hours. Once done you put the server online again and VMware DRS will take control and make use of the new resources. In the storage layer EqualLogic offers a similar functionality called “Evacuation Mode”. Again you tell the storage array to enter Evacuation Mode, it will then automatically move all volumes to another array where room is available. You can now service the array and when you put it back online – Automatic Load Balancing will make use of the new resources. Both of these features are also great migration tools when replacing ageing physical hardware. Traditionally migrating data when buying new hardware was not only time consuming it was also quite complex often requiring professional consulting. With VMware Maintenance Mode and EQL Evacuation Mode this can be done, literally, with the click of a button.
So as you can see, just as Blades and virtualization goes perfect together solving many of the same datacenter challenges, EqualLogic and blades do the exact same – offering critical datacenter benefits in each virtualization layer. And as shown, a lot of it is done completely automatically and intelligently without any hands-on management needed.
Even though virtualization, as you have seen, provides increased data protection and higher availability you would not be protected from datacenter wide disasters. Disasters where you in an instant would lose an entire datacenter. It doesn't have to be a tornado, like the picture, it could be any natural disaster like flooding or earthquakes but also terrorism or sabotage. Now most of you are probably thinking, “How often would that happen”? Well luckily not very often – but when it does the effects are severe. Several studies show that many businesses would not survive being out of their datacenter for more than a few days and even then with huge financial impact to the business. Most business would go bankrupt within a week or two – that is the entire business would be lost. Just spend 10 seconds thinking about YOUR business – how many days would you survive without your datacenter? Or think of, if you would lose your datacenter how long would it take to re-build it? Finding a new physical location, buying new servers, storage and switches, setting up the hardware, installing the applications, restoring data from backups etc…..more than a few days? Weeks? Scary thought, right? Now the good news is with virtualization the possibilities of providing complete datacenter disaster protection is dramatically simplified and that is what we will take a look at in this session.
As we have seen great virtualization solutions are empowered by virtualization on both the server and the storage layer. And one of the major reasons to why customers start using virtualization is increased availability thru better disaster and data protection. And though virtualization simplifies this it is important to understand how to protect such environments. We believe the best approach to achieve full data and disaster protection in you virtual environment is thru a multi-layered protection method. First you have your APPLICATION DATA that each virtual server uses for its day-to-day service. This is best protected with the built-in PS-Series snapshot functionality using the Auto Snapshot Manager . This is a very simple, and reliable, way of scheduling snapshots of your application data, snapshots that can either be backup:ed to tape or moved to a dedicated backup and protection PS-array. This offers quick backup and restore of application data and the possibility to keep several point-in-time snapshots ready for restore. Next we have the VIRTUAL MACHINES layer. To protect this we use the same functionality as for the application data but now with the Auto Snapshot Manager-VMware Edition. With this you can make point-in-time snapshots of complete virtual machines, but by using the PS-series Snapshot functionality instead of the VMWare built-in functionality you relive the physical server host from doing this. Thereby being able to do snapshots without impacting performance. Now with the “soft-infrastructure” protected we need to get the PHYSICAL INFRASTRUCTURE protected. For the servers we have VMware HA to cope with instant failures, and for storage PS-Series Auto Replication offers hardware failure protection thru replicating data to a secondary “stand-by”-array. Adding to that 99.999% availability provided by the redundant hardware that PS-series creates a solid and secure foundation. And please remember that with every PS-array having its own processing power and I/O-interconnect, losing one isolates the problem to that array – the other arrays keep running. And last but not least DATACENTER PROTECTION. Providing protection to your entire Datacenter – for this there is VMWare Site Recovery Manager (SRM) that uses PS-Series Auto-Replication for true datacenter wide disaster protection. This layered approach provides complete, simple and reliable protection for your entire environment. Easy to set-up, maintain and scale. And best of all, most of the features come at no extra cost with the “all-inclusive” PS-series. Next we are going to take a look at the top level of this multi-layered approach, Datacenter protection, with VMware Site Recovery Manager.
Traditionally setting up successful datacenter disaster recovery solutions have been very difficult involving several challenges. Ranging from resources and skills unavailable and difficult to manage to high costs involved for setting up a mirrored infrastructure, software, services and support. And even when you got all that in place it is challenge developing the plans. In what order are servers to be taken online, what dependencies exists etc. And even if you get that right, testing it usually impossible – and maintaining it as you environment grows is a nightmare. All this results in DR solutions that once needed don´t work. Or probably even more common businesses don´t have a disaster recover protection for their datacenter, other than the regular backup-to-tapes – but how useful are those if you have lost you entire datacenter. All of these issues is exactly what VMware had in mind when designing the Site Recovery Manager (SRM) software
VMware site recovery manager is a tool that addresses all those challenges. It is a application dedicated for ONE purpose: designing, testing, maintaining and executing disaster recovery plans. SRM resides “next” to Virtual Center in a VMware virtualization environment – and is completely integrated with Virtual Center. It offers centralized management for DR in the entire virtualization environment. In the tool you create, test, update and execute you recovery plans – from a single console. And since SRM collects all data from Virtual Center it is always up to date. It offers a very simple way of building complete recovery plans and processes. Plans and processes that can be tested without impacting the business. And once the disaster strikes, fail-over is done with the press of a single BUTTON. It is extremely easy to use and completely integrated with Dell EqualLogic PS-Series arrays using Auto-Replication for securing the data. Because to use it you need replication functionality in the storage array, and as you all know by now ALL advanced features such as Replication is included in the PS-series arrays.
The requirements to run SRM are: you need two sites running a Virtual Center and SRM instance per site and then ESX-hosts. Adding to that a storage array supporting replication on each site. For EqualLogic the arrays would not have to be of the same type – for instance you might want to use high-performance 15k SAS disks-array on the primary site and slower but more cost-effective SATA-drive-array on the secondary. Once set up Site Recovery Manager coordinates directly with Virtual Center and the dedicated SRM Storage Adapters inside the PS-series arrays. This means SRM is getting real-time awareness of all that is going on in the server as well as the storage environment. So once a fail-over is needed SRM coordinates all that needs to be done in both layers. As you can see in this example we are using an active/passive configuration with one datacenter being passive and waiting for the disaster. Now, since disasters rarely happen this is a fairly inefficient way of utilizing that secondary site. Another way of doing it is to run the solution in active / active mode. As you shown now. Replication is then done bi-directionally between the sites and thereby protecting both sides. And the physical hosts are live and providing services. This way you now have 2 production and 2 DR-sites. Offering better protection and production. Many customer still decide to use an active/passive mode in which they move their old environment to the passive site when buying a new solution. This way they make good use of hardware that they most likely would discard. This is an excellent way of getting disaster protection at a very low cost. We will take a closer look at how SRM works in the upcoming demo session.
In the last 60 min or so we have been trying to show you, layer for layer, how virtualization, blades and EqualLogic empowers each other – many times solving the same problems and offering the same benefits but from different angles, and in doing so completing each other – creating a far larger sum of benefits when coming together than each individual part would make up.
Add pricing locally based on central bundles, or leave it out and use this as a reference architecture. Or for those of you who want to take the full step and get all the benefits of the Intelligent datacenter today we have our Dell Datacenter Virtualization Platform. A complete, tested and validated multi-datacenter solution. It includes everything you need from servers and switches to storage and software. And of course with 3 year Pro Support for IT 4hrs Mission critical and we will even help you get the servers and storage installed and set up. Adding to this, to secure a successful implementation, we suggest that you add our complete virtualization services package starting with a workshop to understand you needs and what you want to achieve. Followed by an Assessment in which we will analyze you environment to get a good platform of understanding before virtualizing. After that we will make a complete Design of you environment down to where each virtual server is placed and then we will help you Implement it and get it up and running. And to get you Disaster Recovery protection set-up we suggest you add our VMware Site Recovery Manager Design and Implementation.
