It took about six weeks for company architects to learn how to efficiently configure a physical server with VMware ESXi, and HP VirtualConnect Flex-10. Then, one application at a time, the number of VMs in the Development & QA lab grew to 900. The confidence of the IT team also grew as applications running in the lab demonstrated the performance needed in a production environment.
Eventually, live migration emerged as a killer app for the 10GbE on board the HP servers. Usage in the lab also demonstrated the benefits of automated server performance optimization and maintenance. With VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), scheduling server downtime to move applications to less utilized servers was no longer needed. Without anyone knowing, DRS was automatically moving VMs when servers became hot. This made quick evacuation of VMs during vMotions a killer application for the 10-Gbit HP Virtual Connect FlexFabric Adapters on board the G7 server blades.
Vonage engineers provisioned 4-Gbit FlexNICs to minimize the time required to move hundreds of gigabytes of data involved in live migrations, and quickly found the vMotions over-running the 4-Gbit bandwidth. Based on their experience in the lab, company system architects decided to use 10-Gbit FlexNICs in production so that ESXi has the full bandwidth of the FlexFabric Adapter available for live migrations.
The following are a few lessons the Vonage staff want to share with their peers:
--Share your system designs with your vendors: Vonage architects discovered that HP technical staff were aware of issues they encountered and would gladly have reviewed their system design.
--It takes a while to learn how the virtualization layers work together: It took six weeks to learn how to use the server and network virtualization tools efficiently. However, after learning proper configuration techniques, profiles could be cloned by Level 1 operators for rapid VM deployment.
--Take things one step at a time: 18 months ago, there was not a single VM in the Holmdel Development & QA Lab. Starting with a couple of server blades, Vonage architects slowly added application workloads that allowed the rest of the IT team to build confidence in the ability of VMs to perform.
--vMotions can use an entire 10-Gbit Link: Testing showed that vMotions were saturating the 4-Gbit FlexNICs provisioned in the lab.
Frank Berry did not receive compensation in the form of free promotional products or cash or cash equivalent for the purposes of writing this blog from (including but not limited) to Vonage, Emulex and HP.
