HP/VMWare workshop

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This week I attended a fantastic workshop run jointly by HP and VMWare, extolling the virtues of virtualisation using ESX Server.

This came at a perfect time for me as I'm just starting to move towards virtualising most of my LAN at home - finally I'll have the dream of being able to run one box with loads of RAM and disk space (can't quite afford a SAN yet!) - the workshop was extremely informative and gave me a lot of pointers. Of course, I can't afford ESX - I'm making do with VMWare Server - but it certainly got me thinking about what will happen at work in the next year.

Me and another guy are in the middle of a botched AD migration and have been tasked with picking up the pieces (not a simple task in our situation, believe me!). Our project is planned to run until June next year, by which time the infrastructure should be nice and reliable. Then I'll be in charge of the drive to virtualise as much of our stuff as I can. We've got a lovely HP SAN that I've not even started playing with yet, and have been given the budget to upgrade both it and the P-Class blades we have in place to the latest SAN technology and the new C-Class blades.

Some of the highlights of the workshop included a fantastic demo of V-Motion (VMWare's 'live' migration technology) - it was jaw-dropping to watch a machine migrated from one ESX server whilst it was running WITHOUT ANY DOWNTIME and within a timeframe of about fifteen seconds.

The High Availability of ESX' latest incarnation is beyond belief. Stick three well-specced ESX servers in a medium-sized organisation and you could quite happily run all your servers from them, with load balancing, instant failover and live maintenance a reality. Run all your storage from a SAN and you're easily looking at four nines availability, maybe even five.

The VCI (Virtual Client Infrastructure) was also interesting, as was the announcement that VMWare are, incredibly, staying with the 'per socket' licensing model as opposed to 'per core' - especially generous since quad cores are on the horizon.

Talking of cores, the top of the range C-Class blade was shown to us - AMD-based, four sockets, and an astonishing potential 64Gb of RAM - all packed into a chassis much smaller than the current top end P-Class boxes. This little puppy isn't even in production until November, but the demo unit was awesome.

The new C-Class blade enclosure was amazing too - the 'thermal logic' technology used to cool the enclosure was insane - when all the fans were switched to max power (as they would be without HP's 'virtualisation' of the fan technology) it was incredible - it sounded like a Boeing demonstration engine! For the first time ever at a manufacturer's demo I was left feeling that they were actually serious about driving the costs of your power bills down - switching the thermal logic on reduced the noise by a factor of about eight, and is reckoned to slice your power bills drastically.

All in all it was a very interesting experience. I was already a convert to virtualisation, but that presentation has made me positively evangelical about it!

Incidentally, this weekend I'm planning to do a P2V migration of one of my DCs. if that works out OK, from there its just a case of moving my Exchange server over, then I can turn three boxes off and just run one!

 

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Sounds good.

 

Hey Zeb, great post
I was actually in the midst of writing a white paper on 'survivable' datacenters based around the C-class and ESX, my new role is eating into my time a fair bit, but as its a specialist VMWare/Storage consultant role I hope i'll have time to finish it!

was that at wood street?

 

Yep! VMware and the way it works is mind blowing and is taking virtualisation to the next level. At work I have over the last four months been working and using VMware ESX hosting over ten hosts and growing using our HP SAN to distribute storage.

Vmotion, HA and how you can edit a live vm without any downtime is truly genious

 

PMSL i got caught out by this one, I was like wtf Zeb

 

WHOOOOAAAA.

NP of the YEAR, no doubt!

Damn - have I really been riding the VMware bandwagon for four years? I am getting O-L-D!

 

Yes VMWare is amazing at home too for a web designer or software developer. I can store and run full range of Windows Server and Desktop OS's plus Linux on a pretty aged box with upgraded RAM and a second hard disk. I remember the days of multi-booting, and removable HD caddies for switching between OS's.

I find the documentation with VMWare is excellent - everything seems to run as spec'd - its a truly brilliant technology.

When I get time, I'd be interested to get a 'Hackintosh' running on VMWare, to learn about and test on Mac OS X. (Like most PC users I have never owned a Mac).

PS This must be a record for a thread bump !

 

I used GSX 1 for my 2000 MCSE back in 01 / 02 or something
i've done four upgrades to 4.1 already, one of which was 4 hours after the ISOs hit the download site ;)

Edit:
the post seemed a bit short ;)
everyone seems to be enjoying the fact vmotion essentially became free in this release
if you have any edition apart from essentials ($495 for 6 CPUs and management) then you get vMotion, take that Hyper-V!

 

How are you finding 4.1, Phoenix? Any good?

 

Great mate
lots of cool new features, especially in the enterprise plus version
mainly centered around real dense environments and the whole private cloud concept, but useful for smaller enterprises also!