Welcome to the Microsoft Architect Forum Part 3

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Welcome to the Microsoft Architect ForumPart
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Avanade Virtual Server notes from the field

• David Miller
• Solution Director Data Centre Optimisation
  Infrastructure Security
• Global Market Development
• Avanade Inc.

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• Avanade is the leading technology integrator
  specialising in the Microsoft platform.
• Our people help customers around the world
  maximise their IT investment and create
  comprehensive solutions that dive business
  results.
• Additional information can be found at
  www.avanade.com

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Agenda

• Why virtualise?
• Planning for virtualisation
• Identifying candidates for virtualisation?
• The process of virtualising
• Gotchas hints for virtualisation
• Case studies

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Why virtualise?

• Increased server utilisation
• Typically 80 as opposed to 5-15
• Reduced data centre costs
• Beyond server hardware to space, power, network,
  cooling etc licensing
• Increased efficiency/reduced administrative
  costs
• Quicker server provisioning/deployment
• Backup simplification
• The next step in server consolidation
• Support for multiple operating systems
• Increased security over traditional consolidation
• Ideal target for development/testing
  environments
• Patching and upgrade validation
• Security segregation

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Planning for virtualisation

• Dont underestimate planning, commitment and
  upfront investment
• Address organisational challenges internal
  business customers may envisage losing ownership
  of servers - benefits communication and buy-in is
  essential
• Plan to treat virtual servers the same as
  physical servers
• Planning must be completed tightly with
  networking and storage teams
• Pay specific attention to security and management
• Look at testing and administration environments
  first to gain experience and confidence before
  considering production systems
• Plan to control and manage virtual server sprawl

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Identifying candidates for virtualisation?

• Understand and measure performance
  characteristics
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager
• Server management tools MOM (or other)
• Windows PerfMon
• Avoid high I/O and CPU intensive systems
• Consider support on virtual platform of
  application vendor
• Balance with standard server consolidation in
  production
• Typically SQL Server better addressed by farm
  consolidation
• Exchange AD servers scale!
• Evaluate host guest clustering versus standard
  server clustering

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The process of virtualisation

• Approach is generic (applicable to physical and
  virtual)
• Establish a baseline
• Rapid build virtualisation allows copying VMs
  (VHD and VMC files)
• Configuration and refresh automate (MSI
  packages and scripts)
• Safe State the environment virtualisation
  allows differencing disks
• Test automation (scripted)
• Consider Physical to Virtual (P2V) tools
• Microsoft VSMT, Microsoft SCVMM, Platespin,
  LeoStream
• Many pre-P2V tasks that must be completed prior
  to performing any migration key step in all P2V
  work is planning
• In reality, you will have to do some work on a
  small percentage of your conversions due to the
  configurations on your source servers
• Remember the old saying, Junk in Junk Out
  applies with P2V
• Often new build and data migration is the best
  approach

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Gotchas hints for virtualisation

• Exclude VM files from Antivirus real time scans
• .vhd .vud .vsv .vfd .vmc
• The faster the disk, the faster the Virtual
  Environment
• Consider dedicated disks per VM
• Use multiple disks or ideally SAN storage
• Use NTFS compression for the files
• It seems writing a big chunk to disk is slower
  than first compressing the chunk and then write
  it to disk. Additionally the files are around 30
  smaller on the hard disk
• /3GB should not be used on the host
• This setting increases the user memory space at
  the expense of
• Kernel space. Virtual machines use more kernel
  memory than user memory so enabling this switch
  on the host will decrease the amount of virtual
  machines that you can launch

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Gotchas hints continued

• VS 2005 runs smoother when selecting Best
  performance for Background Services and
  selecting Memory Settings to Optimize for System
  Cache
• Using Gigabit Ethernet network interface cards
  can improve overall performance
• Even though the guest OS emulates a 100Mb
  connection, when you have multiple VMs running,
  the performance increase will be noticeable
• Use Differencing disks
• Differencing disks offer the ability to create a
  base .vhd (including just an OS, for example),
  and then write all differences to a new virtual
  disk. The differencing disk might contain
  alternate applications or configurations. By
  doing this you can safe space

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Gotchas hints continued

• Always make sure the latest Virtual Machine
  additions are installed
• Always have the VMs connected to a network even
  if it is the internal only
• Use RDP to connect to your VMs
• You can copy and paste data into the virtual
  machine
• You can share data between your host and virtual
  machine directly
• You can share access to your host's printer
• The smaller (and less fragmented) the VHD files
  the faster
• In the VM run defrag
• Run the VM precompactor

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Gotchas hints continued

• Create the VHD as fixed size disk
• The space is allocated as one big chunk more
  fragments will slow down the system
• If you have to copy files from the host to the
  Guest, use the shared folders
• Copy with drag and drop is 50 slower copy
  through network is only 16 of the performance
  of shared folders
• Make sure the VMs have sufficient RAM allocated
  to them
• Typically the working set from the measured
  performance characteristics
• This avoids the need to swap too much memory as
  this is HD intensive

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Case study Allstate

• Problem
• Allstate had 3,500 servers
• The number of servers in its data centres was
  increasing quickly
• Vast majority of its servers were using less
  than 10 CPU
• Time required to acquire a new server was from
  six to eight weeks
• Virtual Server 2005 used for test development
  environment
• Improved h/w efficiency by reducing server growth
  and associated costs
• Reduced demand for more data centre floor space
• Increase server utilization to 35 to 50 percent
  during the peak shift
• Eliminated server acquisition time
• Reduced server operating system deployment times
  from between 1 to 3 hours, to 5 or 10 minutes
• Time savings increased administrator
  productivity

http//www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.asp
x?casestudyid53154
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Case study Accenture

• Problem
• Test a hosted service offering that included a
  new third-party desktop management application
• Engineers had four weeks to build the
  environments
• Neither purchasing nor leasing new
  servers/workstations was a cost-effective option
  as the systems were only required for a few
  months
• Virtual Server 2005 Virtual PC 2004
  environment
• Virtual Server Windows Server 2003/Windows 2000
  Server for Active Directory SQL Server 2000
• Virtual PC Windows NT Workstation 4.0/Windows
  2000 Professional/ Windows XP Professional/Red
  Hat Linux
• Met goal ahead of schedule, enabling more
  extensive testing
• Significantly reduced its total cost of ownership
  (accelerated the setup of model environments by
  more than 200, streamlined system
  administration, improved IT responsiveness with a
  smaller staff, and enabled more robust testing of
  products and service offerings)

http//www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.asp
x?casestudyid1000004028
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