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Deploy and Manage a Virtual Datacenter

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

As your business grows, your datacenter also needs to scale up to cater to

the growing demands. The traditional approach to doing this is by adding more

servers. But accommodating more physical machines not only requires space and

time, but also increases complexity and administrative overheads. The solution

to these woes is virtualization.

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This way you can save money and space as you make use of the under-utilized

processing power of your existing infrastructure. To understand it better, let

us consider the case of an ISP who has a huge datacenter for hosting IT

infrastructure for its clients. At some point in time, he realizes that he doesn't

have sufficient space to accommodate additional hardware in his datacenter. As a

result, he cannot host any more services. To top it all, he hasn't exhausted

the limits of his existing hardware resources.

Direct

Hit!
Applies

to:
IT managers
USP:Transform IT infrastructure within your datacenter

Links:

http://vmware.com 
Google

keywords:
Enterprise class virtualization 

The alternative is to either build a new datacenter or do server

virtualization. With virtualization, you can host virtual infrastructure on a

virtual server in a few minutes with limited resources. And things work just as

normal with virtualization and no one can ever find whether the infrastructure

is virtual. In this article, we will show how you can deploy such an

infrastructure using VMware Infrastructure 3.

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Installation



VMware Infrastructure 3 includes three components: VMware ESX Server 3, VMware
Infrastructure Management Server 2 and VMware Licensing Server. Deploying

virtualization is pretty straightforward using this software. For this, you need

at least two server-class machines and a NAS or SAN for storage. On one of the

machines, you would have VMware ESX 3 Server and on other you will need to have

VMware Infrastructure Management Server as well as VMware Licensing Server. The

ESX 3 Server machine should have two LAN cards and at least 1 GB of RAM. Now to

start off, use the VMware ESX 3 Server CD to boot it. This will start Linux

based GUI installation for you. During installation, you will be asked to feed

in the IP address for the ESX Server.

Getting started
You can get a 30-days evaluation copy with

one CPU license from www.vmware.com/download/.

You need to register yourself on the site and to get a download link. The

VMware Infrastructure Starter includes ESX Server with local or NAS

storage and full management capabilities through the included

VirtualCenter management agent. VMware Infrastructure Starter's list

price is $1000 per two processors.

Once the installation is done, you will be shown the IP address of the server

on the screen. You can use a Web browser to access the interface of the server

using this IP.

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Deploying servers



The other machine that you would use as a server should have atleast 512 MB RAM,
10 GB HDD and pre-installed Win XP/2000/2003. Install VMware Infrastructure

Management Server and Licensing Server on this machine. Also install VMware

Virtual center client as well. During installation, you will be asked for a

license key file. Provide the same to proceed further. Once the installation is

complete, you can configure and manage virtual server farm on a datacenter from

anywhere using its virtual center client or Web access.

After this, you need to configure the ESX Server license. For this, launch

VMware Virtual center client and give the IP address, username and password of

the VMware Infrastructure Management Server. The username and password would be

those of your Windows administrator account). On successful login, you will get

an interface divided in to two parts. On the left panel, go to 'Host &

cluster' and right-click on it, here you can add either a new datacenter or a

new folder. This is used to structure you virtual datacenter properly, so that

you can manage each and every virtual server under one hood. For example, we

hosted two physical servers with ESX Server: one Windows and the other Linux

virtual machines.

Here, you can see all the available storage and also running a wizard to create storage like the one between your VMware ESX server and NAS storage
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As a result, under 'New Datacenter' head we have created two folders

named Windows and Linux. After this, you need to link the virtual management

center with the running ESX Servers so that the virtual management server can

fetch the information and arrange it in the right order under the folder that we

have created above.

Build a virtual datacenter



To do this, go to the new datacenter and folder that you have created above and
rightclick on it. Here from the context menu, select 'Add Host'. It will

bring up a dialog box asking you for the location of your hosted ESX Server

(give the IP address, username and password of your running ESX Server).

Likewise you can connect all running VMware ESX Servers on the network with

the virtual server. Once connected, it is time to set licensing for you running

ESX Server. On the management console, you will see the detailed summary of the

physical server. Now from the right panel, select the Configuration tab to get

the list of various configuration parameters. Here, Select the 'License

feature' and click on the Edit link given on the top right corner.

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On the Selection dialog box, give the IP address of the licensing server that

you have installed above and click on OK. In the same section, you have to

enable 'ESX Server License Type' to 'ESX Server Standard'. Likewise, you

have to enable license for add-ons such as



Vmotion, VMware DRS, VMware 

Consolidated backup, etc. Next step is to add storage to your ESX Servers.

For this, you can either use shared storage like NAS or SAN or the standalone

storage of the individual ESX Server. We used NAS storage on our setup. Now go

to the configuration tab and select the storage (SCSI, NAS, SAN). This will give

the details of pre-configured storage, if you have configured any on the ESX

Server's physical hard disk during



installation.

NAS with ESX
Before using NAS storage with the ESX Server, you need to configure VMKernel with network interface of your server. To do this, use VMmare virtual center client to logon to VMware Infrastructure Management Server. Then select the connected ESX Server and go to the Connection tab. Here select Networks and click on 'Add Network' link. This will start a wizard to add new networks. Here select the VMKernal and click on Next. On the subsequent screen, you will be asked to select the virtual switch created on a physical network card. Select the first one and click on

Finish.

This will add a separate network path to VMware's ESX Server for accessing NAS storage sitting at a remote location. This will, in turn, keep the normal data traffic on one network and on the other network you can access the virtual machines.

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If you use NAS storage, make sure that you NAS is running NFS shares. Make a

new NFS share on the NAS box, say 'VMNAS'. Here when you click on the

Storage configuration link, a wizard to add new storage for the ESX server will

show up. From the wizard, select Network Storage and click on Next. You will be

shown a window. Here in the 'server' text box, give the IP address of your

NAS.

Then in the 'Folder' text box, give the NFS share you have created above.

Now in the 'Data store' text box, give any name to it. This will be used as

a mount point volume for ESX Server to store the data of the virtual machines.

Now click on Next and then on Finish. Once the storage is configured, your setup

is ready to host the virtual infrastructure. Now you can add new virtual

machines to the VMware ESX Server.

Using your virtual infra



For creating a new virtual machine, right click on the VMware ESX host from the
virtual center client and click on 'New Virtual Machine'. This will start a

wizard, which will help you create a virtual machine. After creating virtual

machine, your infrastructure is ready to serve. With this you can even create

virtual LAN (VLAN) for creating different segments in the virtual

infrastructure.

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Plus, you can make a clone or template of your existing virtual machines and

keep it safe; and use the same clones images to deploy new



virtual machine within ten minutes. This saves both time and effort that you
need to create and configure a new physical machine.

Moreover you can access and use the virtual machines from its Web interface.

In order to access the Web, open the Web browser and give the IP address of your

management server in the following manner: https://<>/ui.

Add-ons



If you want to enhance the performance of VMware, there are many commercial
add-ons available for the purpose. Some of these are as follows.

Interface of a virtual management center from where you can manage your entire virtualized datacenter

VMotion: It allows you to move an entire running virtual machine

instantaneously from one server to another ESX Server, without affecting the

running applications within the virtual machine.

The entire state of a virtual machine is encapsulated by a set of files

stored on shared storage, and VMFS (VMware's cluster file system)



allows both the source and the target ESX Server to access these virtual machine
files concurrently. This performs live migrations with zero downtime,

undetectable to the user.

VMware HA: Also called Vmware High Availability, it provides fail-over

protection within your virtualized IT environment. It restarts virtual



machines almost instantly without human intervention on a different physical
server within the same resource pool. HA continuously



monitors capacity utilization and reserves spare capacity to be able to restart
virtual machines if affected by a server failure.

VMware DRS: VMware Dynamically Allocate System Resources is used with

VMWare HA to continuously monitor utilization across resource pools and

intelligently allocate available resources among the virtual machines based on

pre-defined rules. If virtual machine resources are constrained by the threshold

level, an additional capacity is made available by migrating live virtual

machines to a different physical server using Vmotion.

VMware Consolidated Backup: It's a backup solution form VMware to

take constant periodic backup of your virtual machine. It performs full and

incremental file backups of virtual machines and even creates full image backups

of virtual machines for disaster recovery. More importantly, the backup is kept

at a place where it can be centrally managed.

VMware Import Utility: This is a free beta utility, which allows you

to migrate Microsoft Virtual server and VPC images to the ESX Server. This

process may take time depending upon the size of the virtual machine image.

VMware P2V Assistant: This is an enterprise-class migration tool that

transforms image of an existing physical machine into a VMware virtual machine.

It helps administrators to perform migration across heterogenous hardware. This

also does proactive readjustment of disk size, type and partition to maximize

the utilization of storage resources.

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