Deploy and Manage a Virtual Datacenter

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.