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Why is it that migrating to virtual infrastructure (VI) is most often considered to be the responsibility of the server administrators? Anyone who has already done it can tell you it involves much more than servers and hardware. Even for small companies, virtualizing servers potentially (and usually) involves networking, storage, security, and infrastructure services changes. In fact, it is often as involved and complex as moving your physical servers from one data center to another.

So why is there a perception that implementing VI is only a server team responsibility? Obviously, one reason is because on the surface it’s about installing and consolidating operating systems on server hardware. Another reason is because VMware, the source for all the interest in migrating to VI to date, has done such a great job marketing their products as just server installs.

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Alex Bakman from blog.vkernel.com has created an interesting post about the possible performance bottlenecks of an ESX host. Want awesome performance in VMWARE ESX? is a high level strategy for preventing slow performance. Alex says it best in the post:

“To achieve stellar VMware ESX performance you have to remove ALL bottlenecks in your environment. Remember your performance will only be as fast as the slowest “link” in your performance equation.”

The post goes on to list four best practice tips and gives some brief info about each performance factor. Summarizing the list, the four tips are:

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Australian VAC Partner Oriel has created a clever Virtualization Calculator that illustrates how virtualization is good for the planet. Based on the statistic that the average 2 cpu server produces 12.5 tons of CO2 per year, the calculator not only tells you how much money you can save in hardware and power but it also provides comparable environmental benefit examples such as planting trees, reduced car emmissions, and reduced cow emissions.

I entered 200 servers in the calculator and received the following results (click on the screen shot to see a larger image):

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If you are in a hurry and want to quickly get a “guesstimate” of power and cooling savings from server consolidation check out an online calculator from Platespin. The PowerRecon Power and Cooling Savings Calculator is pre-populated with commonly accepted industry values and essentially makes it very easy for you to enter the number of physical servers to match your datacenter and then hit the “calculate” button. Not only does it give you savings figures, but it provides some basic virtual host consolidation ratios for you too.

Platespin is using some big assumptions in these calculations. From the calculator’s page:

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How many VMs should run on each ESX host? The answer is determined mostly by the physical resources of the host’s platform (storage, ram, cpu, etc.). Before VI3 introduced ESX Clusters with DRS and HA squeezing as many VMs on each ESX host as possible was acceptable. Today it’s not just ESX host capacity, but ESX Clusters need to be take into consideration. Planning Cluster capacity means ensuring availability of VMs while maintaining acceptable host performance in a fail over scenarios.

First, what is a fail over scenario? The first thing that comes to mind is a problem. One or more of your ESX hosts unexpectedly crashed. This is considered unplanned downtime. Another fail over scenario to consider is planned downtime such as rebooting after applying ESX patches. For both of these types of scenarios you want to make sure your VMs stay online.

VMware’s solution for planned downtime is VMotion. The solution for unplanned downtime is the HA feature of ESX Clusters. When determining your ESX capacity be sure to allow room to leverage these features.

VMotion migrates a VM to a different ESX host without users losing connectivity. Evacuating an ESX server by VMotion enables you

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What is VMware’s Capacity Planner tool and how do you get a copy? It’s a common question. Bottom line is that Capacity Planner is not a tool that can be downloaded by a Systems Administrator, but it is a tool that VMware partners use to perform a Capacity Analysis for Virtualization services project.

To understand the Capacity Planner tool let’s first back up and understand the Capacity Analysis services project. When you start to consider how to migrate your data center to VI:

• You need to size server hardware which will become ESX hosts, and you need to know how many ESX hosts you’ll deploy.
• You’d like to explore different vendor hardware platform scenarios for your ESX hosts.
• You need to understand which of your physical servers will consolidate well and which ones are not good virtualization canidates.
• You’d like to figure out a good VM to Host consolidation ratio.
• You need to estimate your total disk storage for the VI solution.

Capacity Planner helps you

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I received an email announcing a new release of PowerRecon from Platespin. It sounds like features have been added to the product to take it from being a capacity analysis tool to a VI monitoring and reporting tool. I will have to stop by their booth and get the scoop.

From the email:

PlateSpin is announcing the general availability of PowerRecon 3.1., and the new Virtual Infrastructure Edition.

Highlights of this release:

VIE features:- Integration with VMware Virtual Center

- Discovery and inventory of the complete physical and virtual infrastructure

- Power and Cooling Reporting

- Virtual Infrastructure Chargeback Reporting

- Virtual Machine Sprawl Reporting

- Priced per CPU

Other noteworthy feature enhancements:- Group and matrix reporting capabilities

- Scalability enhancements

- Tighter integration with the virtual infrastructure layer

- Extended platform support

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