Virtual Infrastructure High Availability: Upgrades and Best Practices

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Virtual Infrastructure High Availability
Upgrades and Best Practices

• Presented by David Davis, VCP, CCIE Director of
  Infrastructure, TrainSignal.com

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Who Is David Davis?

• Director of Infrastructure Train Signal, Inc --
  the leader in Professional IT video training
  courses
• Over 15 years in enterprise infrastructure
  management and years of real-world virtualization
  experience
• Have obtained the following certifications
  CCIE9369, VCP, MCSE and CISSP

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Who Is David Davis?

• Author of six video training courses and hundreds
  of articles for well-known websites such as
  SearchVMware.com and VirtualizationAdmin.com
• Best known for my Train Signal VMware
• ESX Server video training course
• Best of VMworld 2008 Awards Judge
• Company website www.TrainSignal.com
• Personal website www.VMwareVideos.com

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Abstract

• Worries over the availability of virtual
  infrastructures are being put to rest by rapid
  improvements in virtual high availability (HA).
• Its time for many organizations to update their
  virtual HA architectures and implement state of
  the art IT best practices.

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Abstract

• In this session, HA best practices for
  virtualization are covered, along with available
  tools that allow organizations to take their
  virtual infrastructures beyond simple failover to
  application level orchestration and automation.
• We will cover high availability options and best
  practices, load balancing, localized HA,
  geographical HA, third-party HA applications and
  failover scenarios.

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Abstract

• The following topics are also discussed in this
  session
• What options are available to prevent downtime
  when failures occur?
• Understanding virtualization load balancing and
  dynamic migration of virtual machines
• Understanding virtualization high availability
  and disaster recovery

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What I Assume You Already Know

• Assumptions
• Good understanding of server virtualization
  concepts
• May or may not already be using virtualization
• Have, or will have, an application that demands
  high availability

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By The End Of The Session, Youll Know The
Following

• Understanding of HA components
• HA options like load balancing, localized and Geo
  HA
• What is new in HA
• HA Tools in virtualization platforms
• Third-party products available for HA
• HA best practices for virtualization

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FUD

• Do you have fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD)
  about your server availability? YES
• Does virtualization pile more eggs in your one
  basket? YES
• (Does that create more FUD)? YES
• Can HA ease FUD? YES

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FUD

• Virtualization is great in test and dev, but
  theres no way Im deploying virtualization in
  production without a high availability solution.
  If that virtualization server goes down and I
  dont have a HA solution in place, I will lose my
  job.

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HA State Of The Union

• Just about everyone is using virtualization
• Most arent using virtualization to its full
  ability
• That ability is expanding every day
• HA and Load Balancing are a huge benefit -- are
  including and work with all apps

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Understanding HA What is High Availability?
Lets define

• High availability is a system design protocol and
  associated implementation that ensures a certain
  absolute degree of operational continuity during
  a given measurement period.
• In other words, you have low unplanned downtime.

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What Percent Are You Available?
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Understanding HA Virtualization Guest
Encapsulation
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Understanding HA Virtualization Guest
Encapsulation
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Understanding HA -- Terminology

• Localized and Geographical High Availability
• Load balancing vs. resource scheduling
• Application vs. Server
• Clustering vs. Failover

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Understanding HA -- VMware VMotion
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Understanding HA -- VMware DRS
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Understanding HA -- VMware HA (VMHA)
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Understanding HA -- Components Of HA

• Software
• Examples VMHA, vLockStep, VMotion and
  third-party
• Hardware
• Shared storage -- SAN (iSCSI or Fibre Channel)
• Servers

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Understanding HA -- Forms Of Clustering
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Options Available To Prevent Downtime

• Host clustering / load balancing
• Windows Server Clustering
• Third-party
• Virtualization high availability
• VMware High Availability and vLockStep
• Microsoft Quick Migration
• Third-party

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Whats New With Virtualization High Availability?

• VMwares vLockStep
• Rumors of Microsoft Live Migration (Nessie)
• VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM)
• New third-party solutions
• Better use of HA features that you may already
  have
• P2V HA Clustering

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HA Tools Using Windows Hyper-V Quick And Live
Migration

• Quick Migration -- guests moved but restarted
• Live Migration (coming soon) -- guests moved and
  not restarted (competing with VMotion?)
• QM and LM compared at
• http//www.virtualizationteam.com/microsoft/hyper
  -v/live-migration-vs-quick-migration.html
• Today, no VMotion, SVMotion or VMHA

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HA Tools Using VMware VMotion and SVMotion

• VMHA, DRS and Update Manager are dependant on
  VMotion
• Nothing to configure but compatibility and
  knowing the rules are important
• VMotion and SVMotion can be used manually to
  prevent downtime

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HA Tools Using VMware VMHA

• Built into VMware and VI
• Easy to configure
• Can support all applications
• Guest VMs must restart
• Creates HA but still has downtime and potential
  for application issues

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HA Tools Using VMware vLockStep
Virtual Lockstep

• For a given primary VM, run a secondary VM on a
  different host
• Sharing virtual disks with primary
• Secondary VM kept in virtual lockstep via
  logging info sent over private network connection
• Only primary VM sends and receives network
  packets, secondary is Passive
• If primary host fails, secondary VM takes over
  with no interruption to applications!

vLockStep info and graphics are thanks to VMware
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HA Tools Using VMware vLockStep
X

• vLockstep and HA features work together
• Mission-critical VMs protected by vLockStep and
  VMHA, remaining VMs protected by VMHA only

VMware FT
VMware FT
VMware FT
X
VMware HA
X
Resource Pool
vLockStep info and graphics are thanks to VMware
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HA Tools Using VMware vLockStep

1. User selects VM on which to enable FT
2. Secondary VM is automatically created that shares
   disk with primary
3. When primary VM is powered on, secondary VM is
   started on another host via special kind of
   VMotion
4. Secondary VM keeps in virtual lockstep
5. If the primary host goes down, the secondary VM
   will go live and become the primary VM
6. VMware HA automatically starts another secondary
   VM to restore redundancy
7. Secondary VM powers off when primary does or when
   FT is disabled

Virtual Lockstep
vLockStep info and graphics are thanks to VMware
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Third-Party Tools For HA Double Take for VMware
Infrastructure and Virtual Systems

• http//www.doubletake.com/products/virtualization/
  default.aspx
• INSERT INFO

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Third-Party Tools For HA Marathon

• http//www.marathontechnologies.com/fault_tolerant
  _servers.html
• everRun for Server Virtualization -- Best of
  Vmworld 2007 -- but for Citrix XenServer
• everRun for Windows Servers
• everRun for Geographical DR
• INSERT INFO

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Third-Party Tools For HA Neverfail For VMware
Virtual Center And Servers

• http//www.neverfailgroup.com/products/app-modules
  /vmwarevcenter.aspx
• INSERT INFO

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Best Practices For Virtualization HA

• HA best practices for virtualization
• Gotchas -- for VM HA to work you must have same
  CPU on each host or use CPU masking
• INSERT INFO

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Recommendations / Summary

• Virtualization HA Happiness
• HA will further virtualization adoption
• HA will provide business uptime
• HA will make life of the Admin better ?
• Recommendation Take action to learn about and
  implement virtualization HA

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Dont Be This Guy
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Questions?

• If you think of more questions later, feel free
  to email me at david_at_trainsignal.com
• Or catch me on Twitter Linkedin at
• www.twitter.com/davidmdavis
• www.linkedin.com/in/davidmdavis
• To download a free portion of my training video,
  visit www.TrainSignal.com

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For More Information

• www.SearchVMware.com
• www.SearchServerVirtualization.com
• www.VirtualizationAdmin.com
• www.VMwareVideos.com
• www.TrainSignal.com -- VMHA video
• Ill be available at the Ask-the-Expert booth
  this afternoon

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Questions?

• Ask away