I’m hosting my 2nd year of a TechEd ITPro Birds-of-a-Feather session. Didn’t attend this BoF last year? Read my post session summary. It’s on Wednesday, June 11th at 4:30pm to 5:45pm in S330 E (vCalendar Apt.)
The datacenter is rapidly changing as we shift to vitalizing many of our application and Web servers to virtual workloads. This is a forum to discuss physical design changes from the “one box, one OS” to various options like blade heads (build out), 16-way heads (build up), and SAN storage of disks. Topic starters like “NFS, LUN, or CIFS for virtual hard drive storage?”, “Why NOT to use iSCSI?”, “What do you require before considering the jump from VMWare to Microsoft for hosting or management”, “Anyone using Citrix over the others?”, “Anyone aggressive with SCVMM and/or Hyper-V yet?”. Hear big and small shops describe what works and what doesn’t for them; how they address F.U.D., bottlenecks, disaster recovery, backups, and more. This discussion is product agnostic and focused around how we can do more OS’s with less hardware. We had this BOF last year—come by to talk about how much has changed.
NASA’s Shuttle launch of STS-117, the flight of Atlantis to further build the International Space Station, ended up launching Friday 3 hours after TechEd ended. We rushed to get there and were within 40 miles when it launched. It was still amazing from that distance. My bad pictures are here, but a much better look is from 3 miles out (min safe distance) over at dro!d’s slideshow.
On the heels of our TechEd Birds of a Feather session on Virtual Datacenters, Microsoft just released a document on how to implement high availability on Virtual Server 2005 R2. High availability was one of the reasons why many of our session attendants are using VMware, which was said to have a more robust feature set in VMotion.
What a great Birds of a Feather session! We had 60 people in the room for “Physical Datacenter in a Virtual World”, and nearly everyone there has a production virtual environment. We only had an hour and could have easily doubled that (free beer helps). Everyone shared the experiences, and I’m not sure it could have been better! Below are some general “feelings” and surveys I got out of the crowd about their virtual server datacenters.
- Nearly all large production environments were using VMware ESX and VMotion
- Most of those running VMware are testing Virtual Server 2005 R2 to see if they can replace VMware (cost is the big motivator); but the feature set for uptime, redundancy, and performance (SMP) is not ‘there yet’ with Microsoft’s current offering.
- Only a few are testing betas of SCVMM, and the crowd was confused on what features are in SCVMM vs. RS SP1 vs. Windows Server Virtualization.
- No one was building host servers larger than four sockets (they are building out, not up)
- A few are having SAN disk performance issues, even on Fibre Channel. Too many servers patching, booting, etc. can quickly affect all guests on SAN storage
- Costs are not cut and dry. It seems SANs are now required (shared storage) when they weren’t in environments using mostly local storage on servers, which is just shifting their cost from local host (cheap disk) to SAN (not so cheap)
- Most either have iSCSI or are planning for it. One mentioned they are using it for test/dev and only step up to Fibre Channel in production to keep costs down. (I wanted to ask about anyone using iSCSI on 10GbE, but didn’t fit it in)
- Backups are almost always being done via each guest (one agent per guest) but I learned that NetBackup may have a cheaper licensing model for virtual machine guests
- Many were confused or unaware of the Microsoft OS licensing changes around virtualization
- Didn’t seem that many knew of Microsoft’s approach to the .vhd file standard as a format that will eventually be universal (Vista image backup, WUDSS LUN’s, etc)
Thanks to INETA and Culminis for helping making BOF’s happen. Thanks to Allen Stewart from the WinCAT Team, SCVMM Team, and others for answering my virtualization questions on the TechEd TLC floor. I’m hoping we can have the same or similar BOF session next year, and see how Windows Server 2008 Server Virtualization and SCVMM being released will change the landscape.
I had to miss some of TechEd until I arrive Today (Tuesday) at lunch. Even with the much improved Virtual TechEd, CommNet, and pending DVD’s; you still can’t help but feel like you’re missing TONS of information.
Trying to keep in touch with your coworkers onsite is still amazingly tough in 2007… Windows Mobile Phone batteries don’t even last through lunch with Communicator & Outlook running; and WiFi is still hit or miss (assuming like past years that it doesn’t reach the dining hall nor the front of the Breakout Sessions). Funny thing thou: if you’re using Communicator Mobile 2005 on your Windows Mobile phones, you can tell when breakout sessions get out, as everyone jumps back online after attempting to save battery during the session… which is a great opportunity to use the person-specific “Tagging” in Communicator, where you can mark someone (unbeknownst to them) so you’ll get the usual “online/offline” toast (pop-ups) but ONLY for the people you tag.
Here’s another TechEd Communicator tip: make a new group in the full client called “TechEd”, add your onsite coworkers, and it will sync up to Communicator Mobile (may have to sign off/on mobile). Now when in Mobile, highlight the group and blast an IM to the group name in just a few steps. May I recommend: “Lets meet at the Birds of a Feather session number 65 tonight at 7:45pm on Virtual Datacenter’s”… or in IM txt: “cu@BoF65@7:45”