Transcript
Architecting a virtual infrastructure
Duncan Epping
Principal Architect
Integration Engineering – R&D
Agenda
Method Q/AIntro Design Patterns
Introduction
• Duncan Epping
� Principal Architect
� Integration Engineering – R&D
• Also known as Customer 0
� VCDX 007
� Owner of Yellow-Bricks.com
� Twitter @DuncanYB
What is this session about?
• Architecting a VMware based infrastructure
• Design Decisions
• Real world examples
• Understanding the potential pitfalls
• Feel free to tweet / blog about this session
• Most importantly – Interact!
Agenda
Method Q/AOverview Design Patterns
Vision
Architecture
PlanTransition
Manage
Governance
Requirements Management
Change Mgmt
Method
Articulated vision
Business and Technical Goals
Requirements, Assumptions,
Constraints, Scope, Risks,
Use Case Definition
Gap Analysis
Architecture Definition
(Business, Information
Systems, Technology)
Roadmap definition
Implementation planning
Iteration planning
Implement solution
Validation
Continuous monitoring
Optimization
Gather input
• Most important part of any project
• Identify your stakeholders
• Gather information and document
• Categorize
� Requirements
� Nice to have
� Constraints
� Assumptions
� Risks
• Conceptualize
• Sound like VCDX to Anyone?
What are we trying to achieve?
• Many architectural discussions are about challenges
• What are your current challenges?
• How do you solve these today?
• How would you like to solve these tomorrow?
• Ultimately, what are we trying to achieve?
IT Can Take Weeks to Provision
Server deliveryUnpack
Build and configure processMigrate to dev test center
infrastructure network
storage
facilities
application
Security
Change controlapprovals
Go live/production
User Acceptance Testing
Quality Assurance
Ready for use
CAB/Deploymentplanning meetings
Line of businessselects service
Assesscapacity
Order
serverApprove
purchase order
That could be… building an SDDC
Software-Defined Data Center
All infrastructure is virtualized and
delivered as a service,
and the control of this data center is
entirely automated
by software.
Use cases
• Server consolidation (power and cooling savings, green
computing, lowering TCO)
• OPEX Savings on redundant tasks
� Self Service Provisioning
• Server infrastructure resource optimization (load
balancing, high availability)
• Standardization
• Business Agility (Rapid provisioning)
• Infrastructure as a Service
Business Requirements
B101
B102
B103
B104
B105
B106
B107
B108
B109
B110
System provides separate dedicated environments.
Complete automation of the provisioning process.
System leverages shared infrastructure and resource pooling.
Provisioning based on pre-defined policies.
Lowering time to market
Technical Requirements
T101
T102
T103
T104
T105
T106
T107
T108
T109
T110
Must integrate with existing ticketing system
Leverage thin provisioning for storage efficiency
Centralized LDAP directory to be used
System supports a catalog of standardized vApp templates.
System provides differentiated offerings based on cost.
Orchestrated disaster recovery
Constraints
C101
C102
C103
C104
C105
C106
C107
C108
C109
C110
Dell and AMD have been preselected as the platform of choice
Eight 1GbE ports will be used per server
NetApp’s NAS storage will be used
All Tier 2 NAS volumes are de-duplicated
Physical switches will not be configured for QoS
Existing Cisco TOR environment to be used
Limited VLANs available
Assumptions
A101
A102
A103
A104
A105
A106
A107
A108
A109
A110
Staff trained on VMware technology
Shared storage configured
VLANs and IP address reserved
Sufficient rack space available
Sufficient power and cooling available
Agenda
Method Q/AIntro Design Patterns
Design Patterns
Sizing and Scaling
Hosts
Networking
Storage
Virtual Constructs
Infrastructure
Design
Infrastructure
Design
Basic details
What is the use case?
� Time to Market / Business Agility?
� Business Continuity?
What does the environment look like today?
� How many sites?
� How many potential virtualization candidates?
� Multiple waves?
How will this impact your Design / Project?
� Different Cluster / Datacenter structure
� Within the limits?
Sizing and scaling
Use tools like
� VMware Capacity Planner
� PlateSpin Recon
� Lanamark
Do we really need it?
� Don’t all results just look the same?
� What is important?
What am I designing for?
� Average vs Peak
� Consolidation vs Performance
Compute Considerations
How many eggs in on basket?
� Two sockets vs four sockets
� Impact of 100:1 consolidation ratio?
AMD vs Intel
� AMD supports more cores, while Intel generally is faster
� VMmark can be used to make perf comparisons!
Sweet spot?
� Still seems to be dual socket – 96GB of memory
� Optimal Memory configurations
• DIMM sizes versus price
• Triple channel configurations
• Number of DIMM slots might be different per vendor / model
Network Sizing
Is this ever really a bottleneck?
In most of the Capacity Planner reports we’ve seen…
� Expected average network bandwidth requirement ~ 4Mbpsbased on an average of 20 VMs per ESXi host.
10GbE will lift all (or most) constraints for a very long time!
Use the report to identify anomalies!
Storage Sizing
Not only size but performance matters!
(TOTAL IOps × % READ)+ ((TOTAL IOps × % WRITE) × RAID Penalty)
(42 x 62%) + (( 42 x 38%) x 2)
(26.04) + ((15.96) x 2)
26.04 + 31.92 = 57.96
But what about size?
How does this drive your Storage Considerations?
Storage Considerations
RAID level used � impacts IOps
� IOps penalty can be severe
� Spindle count
RTO � impacts amount of VMs per Datastore
� Backup environment need to be capable of restoring within RTO window
� (RTO * restore speed) / avg VM Size
Adding it up…
� 270 VMs from backup perspective vs 50 VMs from IOps
� What does your customer feel comfortable with?
Going SSD / Hybrid solutions?
Host Design
Design Considerations
Vendor
AMD vs Intel
Blade vs Rack
� Density increases
� Hot spots
� Costs
� Management
Additional considerations
� Is embedded ESXi available?
� How much local SSD (capacity and IOPS) can it handle?
� Does it have built-in 2x 10 GE ports?
� Does the built-in NIC card have hardware iSCSI capability?
� Management integration
ESXi boot considerations
4 methods of booting ESXi
� Local Disk
� Local SD / USB
� SAN Boot
� PXE Boot with Auto-Deploy
Considerations
� USB is cheap
� Local disk usually higher availability than USB
� SAN Boot easy to move identity, but what about costs
� Best of all worlds: Auto-Deploy
• Relatively new and dependencies…
vCenter and Clustering
Design Considerations
How many VMs?
� Do I need a dedicated vCenter Server?
� Can I still use the vCenter Appliance?
� Use the sizing calculators!
Is there a need for the Web Client?
� Can I use the vCenter Appliance for that?
� Use it!
Will there be other products used like SRM / View / vCloud
Director?
� vCenter Heartbeat requirements?
Where do we start?
How many physical Datacenters will there be?
Will each physical DC need a vCenter Server?
For each vCenter, do we need multiple virtual Datacenters?
For each DC, do we need multiple Clusters?
For each Cluster, how many hosts?
Physical DC
vCenter
Datacenter Datacenter
Cluster Cluster
ESXi ESXi ESXi
vCenter
Datacenter
Design Considerations
Separate clusters for DMZ?
� Why not use vShield App or vShield Edge?
Separate clusters for test?
� Might also allow you to test vSphere patches!
vCenter Datacenter object is a vMotion boundary not the
Cluster!
vCenter Datacenter object is a VDS boundary not the Cluster!
Will you be using HA / FT / DRS / DPM?
� Will this impact your design?
Design Considerations
Is 8 the perfect Cluster size?� Primary / secondary nodes (4.1 and prior) vs Master / Slave (5.x)
� Blade environment implication on design?
� Linked Clones restriction lifter in 5.1!
� DRS and DPM love big clusters
What about EVC? Should I turn it on by default…� EVC can only be enabled when all VMs are powered off
� Did you know that DRS requires EVC to be enabled to balance and place FT virtual machines in a cluster?
Is there a need for Resource Pools?� How will you handle shares?
� Reservations / limits?
Storage
Design Considerations
Protocol Wars!
Multiple Tiers?
� Or even Auto-Tiering, what is the impact?
vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI)
� Does it impact sizing?
vSphere Storage APIs – Storage Awareness (VASA)
� Will it impact operations?
Thin provisioning?
� Thin, Thick and Eager Zeroed Thick
� vSphere vs Storage Array!
Design Considerations
Can we use Storage DRS?
� Impact on storage array features?
� Impact on sizing?
� Impact on other VMware products like vCloud Director?
Profile-Driven Storage?
� How does it utilize VASA?
DR Requirements?
� Or possibly in the future?
No more worrying about block sizes with VMFS-5
� When upgrading VMFS-3 to VMFS-5 block size does not change!
Did you know VAAI is T-10 compliant?
� Makes leveraging it easier for lower-end devices
Impact of Features
Storage DRS has constraints…
SRM does not support Storage vMotion / Storage DRS
vCloud Director does support Storage DRS in 5.1!
Feature or Product Initial Placement Migration Recommendations
Array-based replication
(SRDF, MirrorView, SnapMirror, etc )Supported Manual: I/O and Space
Array-based snapshots Supported Manual: I/O and Space
Array-based Dedupe Supported Manual: I/O and Space
Array based thin provisioning SupportedFully Automated: I/O and Space
Array-based auto-tiering
(EMC FAST, Compellent Data Progression, etc)Supported Manual: Space
Array-based I/O balancing
(Dell Equallogic)Supported Manual: Space
Networking
Design Considerations
What type of vSwitch will be used?� VSS vs VDS
What are the pSwitch capabilities?
Requirements for Jumbo Frames?
What type of load balancing will be used?� What type of traffic
� Load Based Teaming vs Virtual Port ID vs IP Hash
How about Network Virtualization?
Design Considerations
Network I/O Control� Even in 1GbE environment NIOC is useful
� Especially when connecting outbound
� Did you know that Limits apply to a NIC pair level?
� Did you know that shares apply on a NIC Port level?
Additional Security Requirements?� vShield App
� vShield App with Data Security
� vShield Edge
3rd party security products?� Hy-trust
• 2-factor authentication• Audit trails• Rigid, Hierarchical Access Controls
Agenda
Method Q/AIntro Design Patterns
And we haven’t even touched on…
� Automation / Orchestration
� Monitoring
Questions?
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