Ron Oglesby is practice executive, Global Infrastructure Consulting Services, at Dell, and he specializes in the development of Dell's methodology and intellectual property for the virtualization practice. Ron has 15 years of experience in the industry with a focus on design and architecture and team management for enterprise IT organizations. In addition to being a published technical author, blogger, and speaker, he has been a key contributor in numerous consulting organizations as a technical team lead and professional services manager. His recent areas of focus are in server virtualization, application virtualization, application deployment, Microsoft® Windows® infrastructure, enterprise design, and VMware® and Citrix® Xen® virtualization technologies.

Ron leads a discussion with Dell TechCenter community members that covers enterprise-scale virtualization topics including best practices, design, and implementation. Visit Ron's TechCenter page for updates on his Web articles, blog postings, and books.

Technical Community - Background Reading

Chat Transcript

Ron_Oglesby Maybe we kick off with some "when to virtualize Exchange" talk
Dell-KongY Excellent topic, Ron
jasonboche Great clock management Ron. Kick off in one minute. Keep the football jokes coming :)
Ron_Oglesby Lol..can I get a time out?
Ron_Oglesby Anyway we were just talking (offline) about when to virtualize Exchange and how Anyone here doing any Exchange on VMs?
Emptyone Yes
CRJ Yes
Ron_Oglesby When did you virtualize Exchange? During an upgrade of Exchange or not?
jasonboche Yes, but nothing to brag about. Tiny Exchange 2003 environment
CRJ Yes, when moving from 2003 to 2007
Emptyone Physical to virtual (P2V)
jasonboche P2V for Exchange back on Exchange 2000
Ron_Oglesby My general thought is to do it during a move to a new platform or mailbox server. This allows you to move the mailboxes in batches to the new platform and gauge performance of the machine and end-user performance, thus defining when a new mailbox VM is needed
CRJ I agree; I tried to P2V a large Exchange 2003 server, and it was painful. The Exchange 2007 worked well moving mailboxes on a newly created VM
Ron_Oglesby Exchange is an interesting animal, but basically isn’t virtualized much because of political reasons, not really performance
Ron_Oglesby I wouldn’t recommend the P2V if simple mailbox moves are available
Ron_Oglesby Bunch of Dell'ites joining, I see
Dell-ScottH Man, virtualization topics sure do drive people out of the woodwork :-)
Ron_Oglesby So, people joining but few with topics? What’s that all about. Okay, let’s talk Monday Night Football
Dell-ScottH Let's not go there! Would have been undefeated in my fantasy league :-)
jasonboche This is an open topic?
Brian I have a question: I am with the Dell VSE team by the way; what applications would you not virtualize?
Ron_Oglesby This is open
Ron_Oglesby Brian, I would virtualize anything. It’s not the "application," it’s the work being performed. I have SQL, Exchange, etc., etc. Some servers do a lot of work; some do little. For example, I had a big pharma that had like 170 SQL servers—all of these in one domain controller (DC)
Dell-KongY Ron's article: www.delltechcenter.com/page/adoption+curve+for+virtualization
Brian I agree; I just wanted to see if you had a different opinion
Ron_Oglesby 165 of them use less than 500 MHz on average and less than 1 GHz peak. Why not virtualize though (they weren’t wanting to go to a big SQL cluster
wcnichols Anyone give me some help with Dell Management Console and ESXi 4?
Ron_Oglesby Back to Jason's questions. Yes this is an open topic. We linked from an article on the grading of adoption rate, but yes we are open
Dell-KongY If you joined late, you can click Action, Recent Room History to catch up
Ron_Oglesby Wcnichols, what’s your issue (not that I know the answer)...
Brian I have not been keeping up with Microsoft’s licensing policy. With SQL 2000 Enterprise, it was licensed per physical CPU, but, if I remember correctly, when they went to 2005, they licensed it per virtual CPU running SQL. Where does it stand now?
wcnichols Basically, I followed the Dell Management Console ESXi .pdf, and Dell Management Console still can't communicate with ESXi
Dell-ScottH @wcnichols, here's where all the Dell Management Console engineers hang out: http://en.community.dell.com/groups/dell_management_console/default.aspx
Ron_Oglesby On the Dell Management Console follow the TechCenter link
erson Oglesby: stumbled upon a co-authored article of yours in the latest Power Solutions EMEA Edition, “Meeting Economic Challenges Through Accelerated Virtualization.” Do you have a link archive somewhere pointing to your articles?
Ron_Oglesby As far as the SQL licensing I don’t think they have changed...though I would recommend four lawyers and one engineer if you are going to dig into licensing
Ron_Oglesby Erson, no I don’t have a link archive. I should probably create one. I used to keep a list but then got lazy I guess
russmalenchek Search Google for Microsoft's Unlimited Virtualization Rights. There is good information out there. SQL is still per CPU licensed
Emptyone SQL is licensed like this. Take the number of virtual CPUs, divide that by number of physical CPUs on the host. If you get 2.5 you will have to buy a license for 3 CPUs
russmalenchek You might want to verify that; I have different information
Emptyone I have
erson SQL Server guidelines here: www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/licensing.aspx
Ron_Oglesby So, who has read (or noticed) the virt.info article on grading your adoption of virtualization? Has anyone graded themselves?
Emptyone http://ladylicensing.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!87f95f1b5b21b01e!1716.entry
Emptyone This (link) explains licensing very well for SQL
Brian I agree on the licensing confusion; SQL 2000 Enterprise was clearly per physical CPU, so if you did not want to consolidate a lot of small SQL servers, you could run them all on one virtual host. It got a lot more confusing with SQL 2005 and later, and there was less benefit to virtualizing SQL and more to consolidating to one physical SQL cluster
erson Ron, I've read it
Ron_Oglesby Brian, I think from a strictly resource need point of view SQL clusters make more sense than virtualization, but that doesn’t take into account the politics, change control, and complexity of shared SQL clusters as a service
Ron_Oglesby Erson, did you grade your organization?
Brian Exactly
Ron_Oglesby A lot of organizations will move SQL to a virtual platform to get consolidation without the complexity of the SQL cluster
Brian It was painful to schedule simultaneous upgrades of multiple SQL instances on one server
Ron_Oglesby Exactly. Then because of maintenance window needs of different applications, you wind up with a nightmare or multiple SQL clusters
Brian And every application had to support the upgrade at the same time
Ron_Oglesby Ergo, the "lowest common" denominator problem
erson Ron, I'm at a small ISV that is just now really moving production servers over to virtualization with the new Hyper-V R2 release
Ron_Oglesby Ah…cool! and how is Hyper-V treating you? Have you used any VMware stuff to compare the two
erson So I guess we're pretty late in the game, but we're going to up those to 80 percent from about 20 percent earlier in probably less than a year
Ron_Oglesby Okay. I think essentially all new servers (maybe minus 5 percent) should be virtualized
erson Ron, we're a gold certified partner to Microsoft and we choose Hyper-V pretty much for that reason. A lot of our customers are using VMware so we have it in our lab to play around with
dan_bettinger Erson, I wouldn't say that you are late to virtualization at all. Only ~16 percent of x86 servers are carrying a bare metal virtualization layer
Ron_Oglesby Again, my grading scale wasn’t about when you started, it was about your adoption rate once you started
Emptyone We are going for all virtualized, except for the servers that Microsoft doesn't officially support for virtualization
Ron_Oglesby Emptyone, what platform are you running? Hyper-V also?
erson We dabbled before with both VMware server and Microsoft virtual server and then moved to Hyper-V R1 but felt we were not ready to move everything virtualized on Hyper-V R1, and we had early on pretty good information about what was going into the R2 release
needcaffeine Ron, that 5 percent, would you classify those servers as being high I/O servers?
Ron_Oglesby Needcaffeine, potentially yes. It could be high I/O from a disk/system side, but it could also be a "workload" that could use, let’s say, 6 or 7 GHz regularly
Brian Even if a server is not officially supported, Microsoft has offered some support for enterprise customers. I have not seen their official policy for unsupported servers lately
Emptyone Just finished moving from VMware to Hyper-V R2
Ron_Oglesby Now with that said if you have high I/O (1,500 IOPS) you probably have some decent CPU and memory in use also
HoosierCAB I'm in higher education (university of Illinois Housing) and our main resistors to virtualization are vendor applications that haven't tested yet
Ron_Oglesby Hoosier, saw the same thing in the early Citrix days. We installed the applications anyway, and just had a back-out plan to test issues. In 5+ years of doing this virtualization stuff I have never had an application that "didn’t work." I have only had a few that we moved back to physical for performance, and those were early on
erson Our software needs SQL Server, so we've seen it being virtualized both in house and pretty much every large customer already has it virtualized by now. I've not noticed any fears about virtualizing SQL Server, but of course it's not what is virtualized first when you're starting with virtualization
HoosierCAB They want their own dedicated SQL instance and application server, but we're pushing back as we need to buy new hardware; most are coming around
Ron_Oglesby Hoosier, do your application teams "buy servers"? If so, make sure they see how much cheaper the VM is versus a physical server for their project—shape behavior through $$
russmalenchek I virtualize a great deal of SQL running over NetApp Network File System (NFS). Performance is very good, and UVR makes Windows and SQL licensing very easy
Brian Another approach to unsupported applications is to have a plan in place to do a virtual-to-physical (V2P) migration if you have a support issue they think is caused by virtualization. There are some good tools for that migration.
needcaffeine Hoosier, having worked with virtualization for a while as well, we normally didn't inform the developer or vendor what box they were given; so long as it fit into their specs
HoosierCAB I wouldn't say we have "application teams," but, yes, we're making everyone aware of the cost savings of a couple of shared ESX nodes versus a rack full of underutilized, equivalent boxes :)
Ron_Oglesby NFS has not been looked at enough as far as I am concerned. Lots of potential there
russmalenchek Dell PowerEdge R710 servers with 96 GB RAM and dual Nehalem 5560 series allow for about 20 SQL instances— at least
russmalenchek Yes Nfs is very scalable and manageable.
Ron_Oglesby Russm, be careful there. 20 SQL instances will vary based on the amount of transactions they are handling
russmalenchek True, I’m summarizing
Ron_Oglesby Russm, gotcha
needcaffeine Russm, are these small instances of SQL? Would you run a 200+ GB production database for an ERP virtualized?
Ron_Oglesby But with any of the new servers and new processors the amount of work you can toss at them is amazing
russmalenchek Certainly, given the right hardware
Ron_Oglesby Needcaf, sure
jasonboche We're mostly NFS for most types of workloads
Ron_Oglesby Size of database doesn’t + amount of active work and transaction per second
russmalenchek With HT, you can have 32 logical processors and VMs with 8 vCPUs
Ron_Oglesby That was supposed to be doesn’t = as in <>
russmalenchek Makes disaster recovery (DR) and bulk copy program (BCP) manageable
Ron_Oglesby I like some of the NFS stuff and from a performance standpoint it stands up
russmalenchek 10 GB NFS is our next step. Not so much for performance issues, but 10 NICs per server is a lot of cabling :)
needcaffeine Ron, yes sorry; meant higher transaction per second. Two places I was running low on resources was the storage area network (SAN) and disk and LAN connections
Ron_Oglesby Storage is an important part of any virtual implemention. But the reality is that we get hung up too many times in the "religion" of storage. Must be Fibre; must be NFS, No iSCSI etc. I have seen all of them work just fine. SAN and LAN. Generally, I will see SAN issues first but not at the connectivity level; instead it’s in LUN design and number of spindles per LUN (specifically number of disks and IOPS the LUN can handle)
needcaffeine Ron, tended to do 8 disk 300 GB RAID-10 RG with 500 GB LUNs
Ron_Oglesby What type of disk?
needcaffeine 15,000 rpm Fibre Channel
Ron_Oglesby Okay, so what are you getting, about 120 IOPS per disk, so 8 x 120?
Judd Does EqualLogic support 10GbE yet?
erson No
needcaffeine Ron, can't remember right offhand; wish there was an easier way to move guest .vmdk files on and offline
Ron_Oglesby Not sure. I thought that was road mapped but not there yet
JeffJ Soon
erson Judd, JeffS might have more information about that
Ron_Oglesby Move a guest offline? Suspend or snapshot type of offline?
JeffJ Before end of the year...
Dell-KongY There has been demos of EqualLogic PS Series with 10GbE modules during the last two VMworld conferences
Ron_Oglesby Okay, 10GbE for EqualLogic before the end of year. Will hold you to that
Dell-KongY But as Ron and Jeffj mentioned, not RTS yet
russmalenchek Is anybody here using FT over MAN connections? In a "campus" environment?
needcaffeine Ron, sometimes worked fine through migrate; other times I was Secure Shell (SSH) in and Secure Copy (SCP)
russmalenchek VMware FT, that is
erson Jeffj: same with 2 TB drives? You're working at EqualLogic?
russmalenchek With Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) or the like?
Ron_Oglesby Needcaf, guess I am missing what you are trying to do
erson Kongy, how many ports on those? one 10GbE and one Gigabit Ethernet?
JeffJ Drive certification is independent; in that rough time frame to Q1ish
Ron_Oglesby Russ, I havent done it but have been told that sub 2 ms latency between the hosts would work for FT
needcaffeine Ron, doesn't matter much for here; was moving to new LUNs
Ron_Oglesby Of course, doing that across a MAN you still have the issue of the storage locked in one location; failover happens, VM executes in the other, but is dependent on the storage in the first
russmalenchek It would require sync SAN replication of course, to avoid that
Dell-KongY @erson, let me check
russmalenchek Essentially one stretched VMware cluster?
Ron_Oglesby Russ, even more than that. It would require that the SAN be able to lock both sides for write or (sub 1 or 2 ms) be able to break the replication link and open the target LUN for write. This of course would require some storage virtualization up front that you connect though
needcaffeine Russ, we were doing SAN syncs from Philadelphia to Manchester UK; snapshots were nearly up to date. Most data was in the database, which was synced through Oracle
Ron_Oglesby One word of warning: stretching a cluster can be done, but VMware will not support DRs in a stretch cluster. They are OK with sub 5 ms latency, and you support the storage connectivity but don’t want you to run DRs in a stretch cluster spanning two DCs
Ron_Oglesby Ah, Jason Boche just left. I was about to talk about the Vikings...
Ron_Oglesby So we had a couple of people see the Virt.info article on self grading their adoption curve. Anyone else? Maybe say where you stacked up on that
Ron_Oglesby Tom, how’s it going?
tom_howarth It is going well. Srry I am late—Java trouble :(
erson I'm the only Viking here! I think...
Ron_Oglesby Story of my life. Just replace the Java variable with any technology name. Windows, Office, disk drive, internet connectivity…
tom_howarth I am Anglo Saxon; that is almost Viking
Ron_Oglesby Lol
tom_howarth So what is the chat about then?
Emptyone I'm from the real Viking country :)
erson Tom, weren't we (the Vikings) kicking your %%% pretty regularly :)
Ron_Oglesby Anyway. If you didn’t get a chance to check out the article I would recommend it. You can use it to grade your organization and predict where you will be in a year or so, should you continue at your current rate
Ron_Oglesby The chat is open. We have talked a little disk drives, a little SQL, a little Exchange. Now we are knocking on the Vikings from Minnesota
erson Ron, you should start getting that link archive to your articles starting again. Maybe on Dell TechCenter.com?
Ron_Oglesby Maybe. I will have to dig around and get a list together; I tend to write in starts and stops. A few months have a few articles, then go quiet for a while
tom_howarth So how is Dell treating you then? We did not get a chance to talk at VMworld
Ron_Oglesby It’s good. Same ole stuff. It is IT wherever you go! I like when software doesn’t work—keeps me employed
needcaffeine Ron, well, since I was way ahead of the curve, one wonders what's the next bleeding edge? Have brokers for virtual desktop infrastructures (VDIs) improved?
Ron_Oglesby I think that brokers are a commodity; really, the next "big" thing I think will be client-side type 1 hypervisors. Client-side virtualization will change the way we do a lot of things, and offer us way more options than we have now in the desktop space
needcaffeine Ron, what's needed is an easy way to make desktops thin clients; then VDIs can take over; else cost to replace with thin clients is too much
tom_howarth Brookers are, as Ron says, a commodity; they are much the same; I would look at things like Lilo from Atlantic Computing or Virtualstorm for real innovation on how to do VDI
erson Could you expand on those options on the desktop with type 1 hypervisors?
tom_howarth The ability to make a desktop a thin client has been around for a decade—think about ThinPC from Network Computing Devices (NCD)
Ron_Oglesby Sure. Imagine the ability to run applications in separate VMs. Applications that have their own self-sustained container, and then use something like "seamless" windows to the "primary" desktop. Or, if the "application VM" stands on its own, why can I out source it? Say like a security VM that sniffs your network traffic, does IDs and IPs before traffic ever gets near an OS with real data on it
needcaffeine Ron, don't the virtual applications from Altiris and alike already do that?
Ron_Oglesby The application vendors can then create self-contained, self-supporting containers...no OS that needs to do "everything"
Ron_Oglesby No Virtual applications from say Microsoft (softricity i know best); build virtual run times within an existing OS operating environment. Think about an application not needing that existing environment...
tom_howarth I like the idea; however, how do you protect the host? A VM application is a guest like any other, and the attacker will be on the host before the VM application can deal with it
Ron_Oglesby Depends on how its configured
tom_howarth True
Ron_Oglesby If the "security" VM is the only VM with a network connection and everything goes through it, then you must attack the security VM to get to the host
tom_howarth So in a similar concept to a vShield then
Ron_Oglesby Remember we are thinking desktops here… somewhat
tom_howarth I wish I could tell you about my current VDI gig :D
Ron_Oglesby This is what I think is exciting about the desktop space. It will change the way we do business, unlike VDI, which essentially fits next to terminal services and piggie backs on the same types of terminal service like protocols
erson Ron, great stuff there
Ron_Oglesby :-D
Ron_Oglesby You guys think I should write more about desktop futures? Or server virtualziation?
erson Write about what’s most interesting; feels like virtualization has had its time in the spotlight :)
tom_howarth The only issue with VDI is the cost-to-benefit problem—if you kick Microsoft out of the frame it is very compelling
erson Desktop has been pretty boring for a long time now; some new technologies have emerged but nothing that has really transformed the desktop
Ron_Oglesby Yeah, virtualization as a word and a concept is getting stale. Thus "cloud"...but the reality is that the desktop is the next frontier. And VDI was just people trying to get there without a desktop hypervisor
tom_howarth Virtualisation is now a commodity; that said, there are still a significant amount of enterprises and SMEs that have not even heard of it or still think it is something a mainframe does
Dell-KongY As we near the top of the hour, I would like to thank Ron for leading this virtualization discussion
erson Hypervisors on the desktop like you talked about above could potentially really change the desktop to something really interesting again
Dell-KongY Thank you, Ron!
Ron_Oglesby Tom...virtualization...with a Z
needcaffeine Thanks, Ron
Ron_Oglesby Thanks for coming by all
tom_howarth VDI will only truly be accepted when there is true offline/online integration
Dell-KongY And I would like to thank everyone in attendance
needcaffeine VDI won't be accepted ever on cost
erson Really good moderation of the chat by Ron I must say
tom_howarth Thanks for your time, Ron
erson Quick and informative answers right through
Dell-KongY Don't forget that next week’s chat will cover UNIX-to-Linux migration with x86!
Dell-KongY This chat will be summarized and available for consumption some time tomorrow; if you have any further questions, please post on the discussion forum...great stuff guys
erson How did JeffS manage to drop twice? :)
erson Looking forward to that 10-20-09 Update on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Release 2 Hyper-V. Kongy, what guests can we expect on that chat?
Dell-KongY Ryan Weldon should be on. He's leading the next BRC design effort
Dell-KongY I will also ask Brent Douglas and Lance Boley to join. If you have any specific pre-chat questions, send them my way—later everyone
Emptyone Erson, that will be interesting, yes
erson The last Hyper-V R2 chat was really good, but a bit low on information since it was so new
VeeamMark I am so mad I got here late!
erson Not comforting, but it was a really good chat. So you can look forward to the transcript
erson Oh well, see you next week for UNIX-to-Linux migration on x86