Virtualization – Page 5

VMware ESX Server Storage Best Practices

April 30, 2009 1 Comment

I just wrapped up a Breakfast ‘N Learn at one of my customers on the topic of Storage Best Practices for VMware Environments. A storage agnostic view of things to keep in mind on the storage side of your VMware deployments.

Here is a quick hit of the server storage best practices that should be of value to all VMware users:

Deploy a tiered storage approach
Use a separate LUN for templates
Standardize LUN sizes within tiers
Handle exceptions on a case-by-case basis
Avoid use of extents
No more than 1 VMFS volume per LUN
Deploy all virtual discs for a server on the same VMFS volume

For more details check out the VMware Resources for Virtual Storage portal.

Correctly Calculating Percentage Virtualized

April 8, 2009 4 Comments

Everyone knows the adage “there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.” This about the later, the statistics. When you are managing anything it’s true that you can’t improve what you can’t measure. So if you are trying to improve your IT business using virtualization, you need to accurately measure the percentage of your environment that is virtualized.

Most think this is an easy thing to calculate. However, as I discussed this topic with colleagues and clients it became clear that this number is not always a straight forward calculation and that many people were calculating it wrong.

As an example, take the following situation:

Acme Corporation had 550 servers before they started their server virtualization project. If, after the first phase of virtualizing Acme Corporation ends up with 100 physical servers with 50 of them running hypervisors supporting 500 virtual machines, what percentage of acme corporation’s computing environment is virtualized?

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Most people I talk to about this have falsely thought the environment was 50% virtualized. Half of the physical servers are running virtualized. But that doesn’t take into consideration that there are 500 work loads (computers) that were virtualized and condensed onto fewer servers.

So then the correct answer must be the one achieved by taking the number of physical servers divided by the number of VMs to determine the percentage virtualized. 500%. Wait, that doesn’t make sense. How can you be more than 100% virtualized? (exactly…)

So, what’s the correct answer?

91%.

Here is the correct formula:

% virtualized = VMs / (physical servers running non-virtualized + VMs)

You’re taking the total compute work loads (measured by Operating System containers) divided by the virtualized compute work loads. So 500 VMs / 50 physical servers + 500 VMs = .909090 or 91% (ok, ok…so I rounded up to try and throw you off.)

So next time IT management asks you “What percentage virtualized are we?”, you’ll know how to correctly answer.

Virtualization Kills Corporate Owned Laptop

February 17, 2009 Leave a Comment

Today I had yet another of my customers indicate that they are trying to figure out how to get rid of the corporate owned laptop. Last fall I had a similar discussion with a customer about employee owned laptops. At that time it was a conversation with an IT knowledge worker who would have rather been given the choice of which laptop he could use versus be forced upon a single brand. This time it was from an IT executive who would rather reduce his corporate desktop support costs by getting ride of the physical computers all together.

By providing a yearly or bi-yearly stipend and a set of minimum system requirements, let the employee buy the laptop of their choice. The company provides the business desktop as a virtual desktop that runs back in the data center and the employee accesses it from their own computer. Lower or no hardware support costs, data is secure in the corporate data center, easier centralized backups, and longer refresh cycles as the virtual desktop’s computing power can be dynamically expanded when needed and the servers can run for 4-5 years versus the company paying the expense of the refreshing laptop hardware every 2-3 years.

I think this company could get there eventually. Though it won’t be for all laptops in the organization, but a larger enough number of them to make the savings turn into real dollars.