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Marc_Gelinas
Contributor
Contributor

Are you planning for a large VM deployment? We are and would like to talk with others doing the same.

Hello all,

We are in the process of looking at how to plan for a redesign of our existing Lab Manager environment to a staged scalable deployment of Lab Manager/vSphere4.

Here is where we are at today,

Equipment:

Dell 2950 x 5

Dell MD3000i (15 x 300GB SAS) (RAID 10)

Dell MD1000 (attached to the MD3000i) (15 x 450GB SAS) (RAID 5)

What we are considering for upgrade options:

OPTION 1 (0-12 months usage) Support for up to 100VMs?

Adds & Upgrades:

UPGRADE - Completely reconfigure all MD3000 & MD1000 storage arrays and datastores within VC

ADD - Dell R710 x2 (Dual proc Quad Core, 64GB RAM, 6GB NIC ports)

UPGRADE - Dell MD3000i (UPGRADE DRIVES to 15 x 450GB SAS) (RAID 10)

UPGRADE - Dell MD1000 (attached to the MD3000i) (15 x 450GB SAS) (UPGRADE to RAID 10)

UPGRADE - Replace 2 existing Dell 5324 network switches with Cisco 3750's

OPTION 2 (12-24 months usage) Support for up to 200 VMs?

Adds & Upgrades:

REMOVE - MD3000i and MD1000

ADD - 2x Dell EqualLogic PS6000E storage arrays

ADD - Dell R710 x2 (Dual proc Quad Core, 64GB RAM, 6GB NIC ports)

ADD - 2x Cisco 3750 Network switches

OPTION 3 (24-36+ months usage) Support for up to 400 VMs?

Adds & Upgrades:

ADD - 2x Dell EqualLogic PS6000E storage arrays

ADD - Dell R710 x5 (Dual proc Quad Core, 64GB RAM, 6GB NIC ports)

We would love to know what others in similar shoes are doing. We don't have anything to compare against. Please post any feedback you might have on any of the information above.

We are particularly interested in what hardware others have deployed in support of similar amount of virtual machines.

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10 Replies
MHAV
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Hi Marc.

we have a pretty big size LabManager 3 envirenment with Windows Vista VMs running on it.

Basicly by the information you are giving it is hard to say what the best answer is.

What is the VM Operating System? How big are the disks? How many CPUs does the VMs have? How many RAM you configure for the VMs?

From right now i just can give you some hints of what to do with what you got.

First of all don´t use RAID 5 on your storage because it has roughly half of the Random Read/Write IO of a RAID 10

When you have a Server with two Quad Core Processors you need a minimum of 64 GB RAM

With a Server who´s got four Quad Core Processors you nedd a minimum of 128 GB RAM.

If you want to get into a deeper discussion i´ll be glad to hear from you.

Regards

Michael

Regards Michael Haverbeck Check out my blog www.the-virtualizer.com
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Marc_Gelinas
Contributor
Contributor

We have a mix of Vista, Windows 2003 and 2008. The VM's all have 1 CPU, 1GB RAM, and 20GB Disks, of course linked clones would be different as they are a delta. Going forward we will test with similar attributes accross the 100, 200, and 400VM's. We will have many configurations that will have multiple VM's and few use the snapshot option although we want to be able to use it without crippling the storage as we see now.

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kernelphr34k
Contributor
Contributor

Yup, next week is when I'll be migrating everything, and redoing the infrastructure.

Getting 2 new servers that are 10x better than the other 3 ESX servers that are currently in production. More mem, better procs etc...

I'm taking out one ESX server, adding 2 more. Upgrading the remaining two ESX servers to 3.5. I will have 4 ESX 3.5 servers when Im all done.

Not sure if we are doing the vSphere route yet, In an enterprise so we have to take things a bit slower..... Smiley Happy

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weinstein5
Immortal
Immortal

I know this is going to sound like a sales pitch - but I would highly recomment bring in Vmware or a partner to help you design the environment and help plan for the migration-

If you find this or any other answer useful please consider awarding points by marking the answer correct or helpful

If you find this or any other answer useful please consider awarding points by marking the answer correct or helpful
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MHAV
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

When you use Vista as Guestoperating system make sure you are aware of these things

Windows Vista

A.) You can get big Trouble with Latency on your storage. The similar boot of 200 Windows Vista VMs can take up to 45 minutes. The first VM will be done within 5 Minutes the last one within 45 Minutes.

B.) If you configure not enough Memory for your Vista VMs you will see a strong caching of the VM. The best solution to avoid that is to give not less then 2 GB for each VM running Windows Vista.

D.) Disable the Super Fetch Function in Windows Vista

E.) The Local Index Search Function within Vista causes massiv trouble with any storage system. If you have Office 2007 installed and the Vista Search turned off Office brings his own search function along and you are where you started off with..

F.) If you use Outlook in Exchange Cache Mode you´ll gone have fun again with your storage stystem you might can move the local cache on a LAN Device like Userhome.

G.) Turn off the auto defragmentation of the local disk in Vista.

H.) Reduce the use of the Pagefile

I.) Turn off ASLR a security feature of vista

Regards

Regards Michael Haverbeck Check out my blog www.the-virtualizer.com
s1xth
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Just curious, why are you switching from the Dell switches to Cisco 3570s? I am looking at implementing my first iSCSI network, and I am going to use those same Dell Switches. Anything wrong with them?

http://www.virtualizationimpact.com http://www.handsonvirtualization.com Twitter: @jfranconi
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LucasAlbers
Expert
Expert

why do you turn off aslr?

Turning off clear type will also reduce your network bandwidth usage.

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Marc_Gelinas
Contributor
Contributor

We are switching because the Dell 5324 switch backbone does not have the same capacity as the

Cisco 3750 backbone.

Cheers,

- Marc

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Sly
Contributor
Contributor

I'm confued...according to the specs below, the cisco switching fabric is actually slower and the forwarding rates are similar. I bet many on this forum would probably agree the cisco switch is better, but not for these reasons.

cisco 3750 - "32-Gbps switching fabric" "Stack-forwarding rate of 38.7 mpps for 64-byte packets"

()

dell 5324 - "Switch Fabric Capacity 48.0 Gbps" "Forwarding Rate 35.6 Mpps"

()

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Marc_Gelinas
Contributor
Contributor

In our experience the fabric on the Dell 5324 does not perform to what they state and they don't stack where the Cisco 3750 does. Plus our entire environment other than the two Dell 5324's is Cisco so from a management perspective it makes sense.

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