What will be the next after the server virtualization with any hypervisor in the market today? Everyone may has a different thought about it when they went through the journey with different experiences. VMware are very focus on the future of cloud and we also notice there are more cloud providers in the market to provide the cloud services to everyone around the world. But it does not convince enough for the enterprise environment to go for public or hybrid cloud at the moment. Private cloud are always considerable for most enterprise environment.
Is virtualization meant everything? Virtualization is not, but it had played the important role in the entire journey. Everyone may had faced different challenges during or after the server virtualization in the data center. The next thing which prompt up after server virtualization will often be I/O virtualization and utility computing model. I/O had become real challenges as server virtualization had increased the total bandwidth require to be allocated per physical servers which may easily contains 30 virtual machines in 1 single server. At the mean time, we often see the FC, ISCSI and NAS are seperated with the Ethernet LAN in data center. Can we do it better? my answer is Definitely. Plenty of solutions today such as Xsigo or Cisco Nexus are really ready to address the challenges that everyone is facing today through Infiniband or FCoE.
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We see the growth in the market to be more aggressive for consolidation in the data center for both physical and virtual server from time to time. There are plenty of solutions in place allow blade to support virtualization today such as virtual connect from HP, pass through module, infiniband integration Xsigo, Cisco UCS and etc. This had significant resolved the I/O interfaces require per blade to host the virtualization host server. CPU and memory per blade and significant increase with the latest release from all the major server vendors, the CPU, memory and disk I/O are no longer the concerns for virutalization.
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Recently I run some stress test on our VMware farm due to the prove of concept we try on some new products and I have some finding would like to share.
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Personally, I just initiated the prove of concept with the local vendor in our environment regarding the Xsigo Virtual I/O integration into our existing Network, Fiber Channel and ESX 3.5 Virtualization server. I would like to share some of my finding which I think may be useful for reference purpose.
Before the approach on Xsigo, I am actually working on the new design plan to improve the performance and capabilities of the existing virtual infrastructure for the large scale virtualization in our environment. I am actually think about the Cisco director switch on Fiber channel and the network switches of 6509 with 10Gb module, but the cost of doing this, is really going to kill us for the current economy down turn. Suddenly, I been introduce by my buddy with this brand new products which I setup the POC now and I found that is more make sense to look in this product to unlock the under utilize bandwidth in our DC include both Network and Fiber Channel.
Advantages:
- HCA is cheaper than HBA as we may need 2 HBA per server for redundancy purpose, which only provide 8Gb bandwidth, the HCA will provide 20Gb per HCA, which will be powerful enough for virtualization purpose.
- HCA will combine both network and fiber channel capabilities, reduce cabling requirement and improve bandwidth utilization.
- With Vnic and Vhba, we will able to create and utilize existing available bandwidth by reduce the number of FC and Network switches in the Data Center.
- I will able to reduce the cabling from 18 to 2 HCA connection per ESX in my environment
I am currently stress test the performance on the Xsigo chassis on our ESX, interesting that it will not sacrifice the performance as it able to perform as same as the previous configuration we done. Now, it provide the opportunity for me to utilize the FC ports in my Data Center without increase the number of FC switches, which is currently 95% utilize. Imagine, with 4Gb FC for HBA, except the high performance database server, we will not able to utilize the storage bandwidth on each FC ports. Same time, the gigabit network, will not be consume for more than 10% most of time, will provide more resources for the system which require extra bandwidth in the data center. Xsigo has the intelligent to manage the bandwidth and assign as needed.
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For a while ago, I had spoken to my team and friends about the amazing concept if we do able to use the HPC concept to scale our Server hardware in term of processors, memory and I/O without increasing the amount of ESX server in the Virtual Environment. I remember the question had been raised to the VMware representative and this is not in the road map for the ESX servers. 2 days back when I attended the seminar in town and I found this interesting server which is IBM X3950 M2 had been presented with the capabilities I had been looked around. Some of my friend may think the idea of doing this is crazy or over limit, but in real scenario, you will realize the benefits in term of managing and scaling from time to time when you managing a real huge environment with a massive amount of Virtual Machines.
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