VMware had setup their regional Asia South office in Singapore quite some times ago. Personally, I am wondering should this be the correct decision to be based in Singapore which is seems to be a higher cost sustain area, and the IT market in that area are just not focusing enough compare to Malaysia. The reason of saying this, is not because myself is a Malaysian.
1 of the good example, IBM had ship their regional office to Malaysia from Singapore previously, because they saw the potential market grow in this country as well as more talent source in Malaysia for IT related area. Many of the IT giant are setup the IT hub, data center as well as corporate office in Malaysia to enjoy the TAX free holiday as well as cheaper real estate cost and man power resources. There are HP, IBM, DELL, SHELL, EDS, HSBC, Prudential and etc around in Malaysia. Guess what, most of them are even having their production data center in Malaysia itself.
Now we go back to VMware, virtualization is growing in Malaysia, but the present from VMware are more relay on the partner in here. Training are not provided as what been provided in Sinagpore or Australia. Most of the time, even in singapore training center, the attendees are not Singaporean. As economy crisis now, to attend a training in Singapore will be 3 times more expensive for someone who attending a training in Malaysia. If I not mistaken, they have less than 10 employees in malaysia for VMware itself. It just not big enough to attract the confident of the potential giant customer from Malaysia market if you do not present yourself strong enough as your competitor.
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1st of all, the reason of being utilize blade system in the market are looking at the point of servers consolidation, reduce power consumption and reduce the TCO require to purchase in term of hardware compare to the 1U, 2 U and 4 U servers. When we do compare the reason of having blade, you will always notice it was comparable between 2U and 1U servers in the x86 family and data center environment. In large scale deployment, you will always see that the Blade allow you to scale and spend in the sense with more stand alone machine you can have with the limitted rack space and power you do have in your DC. These seems to make sense for us to start moving to blade, BUT it also have some risk which will become major issue later on.
Before you can use blade, you require higher power consumption per rack to support approximately 30 to 32 blades per racks on 42 servers rack. At the same time, the cooling unit design in you DC require to be customize to ensure your blade chassis is working in perfect condition. Once you have this, then you may able to start think about Blade.
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As many of us may know that there are some article talk about the High Efficiency Data Center. I would like to talk about 1 of the major point here which is Virtualize & Consolidation, since our site is more focus on Virtualization.
High Gas/Petrol price become an global issues, no matter which region or which country are you from, this had become and issue which drive the Operational Cost for a Data Center to keep alive from daily basis. In Malaysia, the goverment had recently increase the commercial eletricity for 26 %. Imagine that if you DC consume RM 30000.00 a mount from power perspective, you had to pay RM 37800.00 a month. that had been significant impact the entire IT budgets plus the operational cost. As IT always be the main driver for most business today, we may need to provide a highly efficient Data center solution which able to recover the ROI within the shortest period as possible. Virtualization & Consolidation had come to the point for this.
As if we compare the power consumption from major chip maker like AMD and Intel, the watts per processor had stack and remain the same for the last 3 generations at least. The only improvement they made was really the perfomance per watt. 6 cores and 8 cores had been down the road, I will be strongly encourage who had not adapt to virtualization need to start virtualize or prepare to virtualize 80% of thier production environment.
My environment currently had running the entire DR solution with VMware technology. In production, I do have more than 50 production VM which provide web hosting, middleware, file & print servers and etc. Imagine you had a tight budget with only 50k USD, how many of physical servers will you able to buy from there? and wat about the amount of power you need to absorb on monthly basis? That is the real cost as many of you may had not see the electric bill. For my case, my cost center had to paid for the power bill ourselve.
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As virtualization become the hottest topic for IT nows day, more and more servers had been built by the vendor to succeed the market demand to virtualize the customer production environment. It always come to a point that the Vendor claim thier servers are the best for virtualization. But in real scenario, as a customer, we will have to spend time to figure out the cost and effective solution for our virtualization
Couples of important point that need to be consider during the implementation of Virtualization is :
- Hardware compatibility
- Storage choices
- networking equipment
- System architecture
- Support and operation maintenance
- CPU model and brand ( AMD or Intel )
This topic I will be more specify to the server model for virtualization. In couple of test and real case experience, I do compare the cost, performance, services and reliability within IBM, HP and DELL before I decide to move forward with my final decision.
DELL had recently launched the R900 and R905 this year specifically to support for 4 physical CPU sockets which able to host up to 16 cores of CPU with the latest quad core technology from both Intel and AMD which allow the memory to scale up to 256GB of physical memory if you go for the 8GB/module in DIMM slot. 1 interesting you may need to look at the servers is the on board 10Gbps capable network ports. The server itself had come with 4 on board NICs with capable to run the next generation ethernet 10Gbps. As network bandwidth become a big challenge after the virtualization, this connection will provide better cabling management and of course higher throughput once the 10GbE in place. The additional PCI slot on the 4U servers do provide flexibility to add-on fiber channel HBA or additional Ethernet card to provide redundancy and fail over path for HA purpose.
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Recently there had been strong grow and push for the 2nd tier ISCSI storages from the SAN Storage company like Netapps, EMC, DELL, HP, IBM and etc. A lot of the white paper and marketing brochure had been publish and been communicated to the public in worldwide, which claim the VM is out perform with the ISCSI VS Fiber Channel SAN.
I would like to share couple of my finding in the real Prove of concept and test that myself had personally setup and experience here. VMware do support hardware base ISCSI HBA and software base ISCSI through its VMkernel. Couple of thing that you may want to consider before we really decide to proceed further with the ISCSI. Networking become more and more important since the last decade to be operate most of the important pieces in the Production Data Center. Networking had also become the major issue for most of the time especially in VM environment which may need a bigger bandwidth to support the multiple VMs that been consolidated to single Physical Host.
I had been invited by the Equal Logic vendor to run the real test with the demo in my datacenter. Below is the major finding I would want to share
Test Equipment
Server – DELL PE 2950 8GB and 2 x Quad Core 2.0 Ghz
Storage Switches – DELL Gigabit Switches
Storages – Equal Logic PS 5000 with SAS HDD
Operatin System – SUSE Linux, Windows 2003, ESX 3.5
Impressive
- High Processing speed due to the processor build in for each storage bay. It can be scale up to 12 storage bay in the cluster basis. Each enclosure contains 16 physical spindle drives with SAS technology
- Simplify management – the entire process to configure the storage to be useable is less than 15 Mins. Its all web base and able to run on the open source browser such as firefox
- Maximize through put through the software ISCSI initiator been tested on servers and my personal laptop. It able to suck up 97% of the gigabit through put from my laptop gigabit connection and the server gigabit connection as well.
- High redundancy with global hotspare configuration recommended
- Impressive load balance feature which able to scale from storage and perfomance perspective. Additional enclosure will provide additional spindle power and processing power from the stroage bay. Compare to Clariion series currently, which always provide slow perfomance when the storage are only 60% populated.
- Shorter commissioning process and reduce provisioning time line. almost plug and play
- RAID 50 available as an option to be configure during the provision process
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