Nice video of a day in the life of some VI servers using DRS with DPM (distributed power management) enabled. As the workforce comes into the office, utilization increases, ESX servers come out of standby mode, VMs get VMotioned, and everybody’s happy. The process reverses itself after 5pm. (Who leaves work at 5pm?) And the servers happily sleep overnight or until you need them again. And the sys admins? Feet up, watching YouTube, never touching a power switch or a mouse. It’s all automatic.

From instigator Scott Drummonds: VMware Communities: Virtual Performance: DPM Power/Performance Video.

We started the test with 13 tiles worth of VMs (108 VMs in all) on the
DRS cluster. With all of these VMs idle, DPM consolidated them to a
single host and turned off three servers. As the load was applied to
the VMs at 9:00 AM and driven through an eight-hour workday, DRS and
DPM powered on servers and balanced load, as needed. When the day ended
at 5:00 PM, the load was again consolidated and servers were powered
down. The video we shot includes power meters of the systems under test
and screenshots of activity induced by DRS and DPM.

Link: VMware: VMware: Virtual Reality: At Virtualization Event, Microsoft Says “Get Virtual Now”… but Wait Until 2010 for Live Migration.

Now you may say, “Yes, Microsoft is late, but I’m ok waiting.” But
waiting costs your company real dollars. Look at this simple example:
By using VMware VMotion for planned server maintenance in a 150-VM environment you can save almost $60,000 a year
in operational costs. If we scaled to a 1000-VM environment, it results
in almost $400,000 of cost savings a year. If you use VMotion for more
than planned server maintenance, and use it for dynamic load balancing,
distributed power management, etc, you’ll save even more!

 

Live Migration is a Core Virtualization Requirement

To pre-announce live migration – twice – shows that even Microsoft has realized the foundational role that live migration plays in a virtual datacenter. It’s not a “nice-to-have” but a “must-have” capability.

Link: Book: A Practical Guide to Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery with VMware Infrastructure 3 | virtualization.info.

One week ago VMware started a new, very welcome initiative: the
publishing of long books, called VMbooks, about specific topics.

 

The first one, 232 pages, is titled: A Practical Guide to Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery with VMware Infrastructure 3.

 

   

This
VMware VMbook focuses on business continuity and disaster recovery
(BCDR) and is intended to guide the reader through the step-by-step
process to set-up a multisite VMware Infrastructure that is capable of
supporting BCDR services for designated virtual machines at time of
test or during an actual event that necessitated the declaration of a
disaster, resulting in the activation of services in a designated BCDR
site.

A VMworld Expert Session lets you interact with an industry speaker. The expert records a presentation and then sticks around for two weeks on a discussion forum to answer questions and keep the discussion going. The lastest expert session is from Kevin Epstein of Scalent Systems, who help keep your data center running smoothly with business continuity and automation solutions. Link: VMworld.com: Scalent Expert Session.

• Are you responsible for ensuring the uptime and availability of hundreds of server systems?
• Are you wrestling with the tradeoffs between budget and reliability, availability, performance, and utilization?
• Have you ever wondered how long it would really take to bring back your business if your data center were hit by a disaster?

Join this presentation and discussion on the big three challenges
facing server failover—software configuration, network connectivity,
and storage access. Contrast several different approaches—from
traditional backup—to the use of virtual machines—to the next
generation of workflow engines (such as VMware Site Recovery Manager)
and complementary real-time data center automation (such as Scalent
V/OE). This presentation features case studies from several Scalent
clients, as well as a discussion of real cost savings based on actual
reduction of disaster recovery hardware, even as reliability was
improved.

IBM’s Massimo Re Ferre’ with another long thought-piece on the philosophical differences between traditional custering (application- and OS-dependent, complicated) with approaches like VI3’s High Availability (HA) (treats workload as a virtual appliance, simpler). Massimo works directly with customers, so although he recognizes that paradigms are changing, he looks at the strength and weaknesses of both approaches, and alludes some of the organizational and operational changes you’ll have to make to get there.

Link: IT 2.0 Main Blog : VMware HA Vs Microsoft Cluster Server: we are at the inflection point.

If you stop for a minute and think about what it is happening in this
x86 virtualization industry, you’ll notice that many infrastructure
services that were typically loaded within the standard Windows OS are
now being provided at the virtual infrastructure layer. An easy example
would be network interface fault tolerance: nowadays in virtual
environments you typically configure a virtual switch at the
hypervisor level, comprised of a bond of two or more Ethernet adapters
and you associate virtual machines to the switch with a single virtual
network connection. What you have done in this case is that you have
basically delegated the virtual infrastructure of dealing with Ethernet
connectivity problems. This is a very basic example and there are many
others like this such as storage configuration/ redundancy/ connectivity.  …

We are clearly at an inflection point now where many customers that
used to do standard cluster deployments on physical servers (which was
the only option to provide high availability) are now arguing how to do
that. They now have the choice to either continue to do so in virtual
servers as opposed to physical servers (thus applying the same rules,
practices and with little disruption as far their IT organization
policies are concerned) or turning to a brand new strategy to provide
the same (or similar) high availability scenarios (at the cost of
heavily changing the established rules and standards). The reason I am
saying we are at an inflection point is because I really believe that
the second scenario is the future of x86 application deployments, but
obviously as we stand today there are things that you cannot
technically do or achieve with it. Plus, there is a cultural problem
from moving from an established scenario to the other.