Virtual Life

VIRTUAL LIFE

Clinton A JonesEastern Kentucky UniversityDepartment of Technology

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OUTLINE Motivation: Need for more advanced network with

limited space Introduction: Research on Virtualization Problem Statement: Install multiple virtual servers

and configure them to load balance on the same physical disk

Proposed Solution: How to solve the problem Implement Solution: Set Up and Test Proposed

Solution Results and Conclusions: Success, or a Learning

Experience? Future Work: Implementation

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MOTIVATION Servers take up precious, expensive physical

space Many identities utilize multiple physical

servers in a load balancing implementation Even small, home networks sometimes use

multiple physical servers to store different resources on

My own home network utilizes three separate servers for different, but necessary resources

I need to make my network more flexible, but shrink it’s physical and environmental impact

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INTRODUCTION This project investigates the corporate

use of virtual server clusters and examines the feasibility of utilizing a scaled down application in a home network environment

I wanted to minimize the space taken up by multiple physical servers, as well as the power consumption and heat production of those servers

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INTRODUCTION

Research: www.vmware.com http://blogs.msdn.com Support.microsoft.com http://www.dabcc.com http://lbvm.sourceforge.net

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PROBLEM STATEMENT

Develop Virtual Replicas of existing physical servers

Develop load balancing protocols for said virtual servers to allow for smoother network traffic

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PROBLEM STATEMENT

To make this:

Into this:

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PROPOSED SOLUTION Investigate pre-built virtual cluster

solutions Investigate Free Solutions: Linux,

Embedded Utilize Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V

technologies Determine how each different virtual

machine integrates with the host hardware, and how it communicates on the network

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PROPOSED SOLUTION

Obtain Hard Disc Drives large enough to support multiple virtual environments

Install and evaluate VirtualPC 2007, VMware, Virtual Box, and XEN for Linux.

Evaluate Hercules Load Balancer Virtual Appliance for VMware

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IMPLEMENT SOLUTION

Installed openSUSE 11.2 and the XEN virtual environment

Free Solution, however difficult to implement on my network

Found it difficult to attach to shares from various Windows Flavors. NLB was non existant.

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IMPLEMENT SOLUTION VirtualBOX Ubuntu Linux Samba easy to configure, shares easy to

connect to from Windows. SWAT Web Interface for Samba easy to

configure. Network Load Balancing difficult and

unreasonable to implement in this scenario

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IMPLEMENT SOLUTION

VMware Successfully virtualized Mac OS X Virtualized Mac OS is almost

useless for the task at hand No network communications from

Mac OS or to Mac OS. Ill suited for server environment

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IMPLEMENT SOLUTION

VirtualPC Easy to setup, configure and get

started Could only run one Virtual Machine

at a time Since only one VM was active at a

time, it was “virtually” impossible to implement NLB

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IMPLEMENT SOLUTION

Hercules Load Balancer Virtual Appliance

Works with VMWare. “A tiny but mighty tcp load

balancer” Can run on as little as 32MB of ram

and as little as 4MB of disk space

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RESULTS

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RESULTS Success in reducing the number of

servers on my home network to a single physical machine

Success in finding a new understanding of load balancing and mixed network environments

Reduced the temperature in my “office” by several degrees, and notice my electricity bill has diminished.

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CONCLUSIONS Found that NLB is more involved than I

anticipated Unfortunately, was not able to

implement load balancing to the degree that I wanted

Settled on running multiple Virtual Machines with separate, unlike tasks to spread the workload over many virtual CPUS

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CONCLUSIONS

From my involvement in this project I learned that there are “stand alone” load balancer network appliances

Similar to a hardware firewall in that it is a hardware and software package

I have a new understanding, while still basic, of how to navigate, and survive in the Linux CLI

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CONCLUSIONS

I determined that multiple virtual servers on a single physical machine requires a hard wired network connection

No two VM’s would utilize the wireless network connection at one time

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FUTURE WORK

Includes “remodeling” my host machine to include a more powerful CPU and multiple network cards

Further pursuing the Hercules Load Balancer and Vmware Virtual Appliances to implement a true virtual cluster environment

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REFERENCES Bisht A. . Clustering and High Availability: Network Load

Balancing and Virtual Machines. 2010. Available at http://blogs.msdn.com/clustering/archive/2009/03/09/9468109.aspx. Accessed March 23, 2010

. Network load Balancing. VMware Support and Downloads. 2010. Available athttp://www.vmware.com/support/esx21/doc/esx21admin_cluster_loadbal_esx.html. Accessed March 23, 2010

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FEEDBACK

Questions? Comments?

Thank you for attending.

Contact InformationClinton Jones

[email protected]