Tools to Manage Virtualization in Your Data Center

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Saturday, August 02, 2008

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Parallels Virtuozzo Containers
Parallels Virtuozzo Containers is an OS virtualization solution. It has changed quite a bit since we last covered it in PCQuest. Lets tell you a bit about the solution before we discuss the management part of it.

Virtuozzo containers allows users to create isolated containers on top of a physical server with same OS instance. Every single container can operate like a standalone isolated server. As a result, you are not only able to perform server consolidation, you can also save OS costs. Virtuozzo also supports Dynamic Resource allocation through which you can make changes to memory, network, disk space to a running Virtuozzo container. Live migration and BCP capabilities are also supported by Virtuozzo containers. Virtuozzo containers can run on Windows 2003 as well as on Linux.

Managing Virtuozzo containers
There are two ways through which you can manage Virtuozzo containers - through Virtuozzo Parallels infrastructure Manager and Parallels Management console.

Parallels Infrastructure Manager
This is basically the Web interface for Virtuozzo containers. It provides a centralized view of managed infrastructure through dashboards and lets administrators create logical groups of managed objects. It also provides Mass management across multiple servers, i.e you can make changes and apply them to more than one container at the same time. PIM also lets administrators do consolidated monitoring of all containers and also gives them consolidated view of all alerts.

Parallels Power Panel
For end users who should only have access to the container created, parallels has a Web interface called Parallels Power Panel. Through this, end users can perform administration tasks related to that particular container from anywhere. They can perform tasks like start, stop container as well as its services, processes etc, take back ups, access container through RDP, monitor container resource usage, etc.

Parallels Management Console
This is a remote management console for Virtuozzo containers 4.0. It can be installed on Windows 2000/XP/2003 as well as Linux. This graphical management console comes with Virtuozzo containers itself and can also be installed separately. Console lets administrators perform most of the administrative tasks such as Container configuration, Migration, Template management, Alerts etc. However there are few tasks that cannot be performed through this console, these tasks include taking backups, etc. Virtuozzo containers also come with few command line utilities for management such as vzcache (caching files in a hardware node), vzctl shrink (for shrinking VDDs) etc

VMware Infrastructure 3
VMware Infrastructure 3 needs no introduction. VMware VirtualCenter component of VMware infrastructure provides centralized management and resource optimization of VMware environment. Here we are going to discuss some of the management features of Virtual center through which you can effectively manage your VMware environment. If you want to know about how to build a virtual data center using VMware Infrastructure 3, refer to October 2006 issue of PCQuest. Here we are only going to discuss advanced management features of VMware Infrastructure 3.

VMware Update Manager
VMware Update Manger allows VMM admins to perform automated patch management. It scans guest operating systems running as well as ESX Server hosts and compares the state of the machines according to the baselines set and updates them accordingly. These updates are retrieved by update manager automatically from vendors such as MS, VMware etc. VMware update Manager automatically takes a snapshot of a VM before updating it, this is to ensure if a VM crashes because of a new update, Administrator can rollback old state of VM immediately. It can also patch VMs which are suspended or offline. When updating VMware ESX hosts, it puts ESX hosts in maintenance mode and migrates VMs to other hosts while patching to ensure there is no disruption. Once the updation of ESX host server has completed, VMs are migrated back. VMware Update manager is installed as part of VirtualCenter and can also be separately installed on Win XP SP2 and Windows 2003.

VMotion
This utility 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 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.

Microsoft System Center VMM 2007
System Center VMM 2007 is a centralized virtual machine manager from Microsoft. Through VMM 2007 you can manage virtual machines hosted in MS Virtual Server 2005 through central console. In fact if you haven't already deployed Virtual Server in your environments, you can start with VMM 2007 and create Virtual Machines from scratch and manage them effectively through this solution. VMM 2007 comes with easy to use wizards for physical to virtual conversion and virtual to virtual conversion.

In VMM 2007 you can also create a library server which can host all resources required for creating and managing virtual machines such as ISO files of operating systems, virtual hard disks, configuration templates etc. You can also create virtual machine templates which stores information like hardware configuration, guest OS settings etc. These templates can be easily deployed when creating a new VM, this also helps in ensuring consistency across the data center.

Another useful feature in VMM 2007 is Virtual Machine Manager Self Service portal. This portal allows users to independently manage and create their own virtual machines. When users connect to this portal they will only view the virtual machines they have permission to access. This can be helpful in development and testing environments where frequent provisioning of VMs is required.

Deploying VMM 2007
VMM 2007 has three main components--VMM Server, Administrator Console, and Self-Service Portal. VMM Administration console can run on Windows XP and 2003, but VMM Server can only run on Windows 2003 (SP1,SP2,R2). Other pre-requisites include Windows PowerShell 1.0, WinRM and MS SQL 2005.

Installing VMM 2007 is straightforward. It requires .Net framework 2.0 and 3.0. When installing VMM2007, you would need to log on with domain administrator privileges. Once installed, you need to add Host Server before you can create virtual machines. This can be easily done through 'Add Hosts' Wizard. Wizard will ask you to choose the Host server's from the domain and provide administrative credentials for the domain. Once the wizard has finished it will deploy an agent on the server and after successful completion. New host can be viewed under Hosts menu. Now you are ready to create virtual machines, this can be done through New Virtual Machine wizard.

You can also convert a physical server into a virtual machine, through Convert Physical Wizard. To do this from the Actions window, click on 'Convert Physical Server'. Here first it will ask you to select the physical server which you want to convert into a virtual machine with its administrative credentials. Next you will be asked to provide details for new virtual machine, and the wizard will install agent on the physical server and will start gathering system information. Next wizard will ask you to choose which volumes present in physical server, you want to copy on virtual server and on which host you want to deploy this virtual server. Before finishing, wizard will ask you to verify the settings for the new virtual server, after you click on finish it will start converting the physical server into virtual. Once finished you can manage this new virtual server from the VMM 2007 main console, just like any other VM.

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