Virtual Infrastructure High
Availability: Upgrades and
Best Practices
Presented by David Davis, VCP, CCIE
Director of Infrastructure, TrainSignal.com
Who Is David Davis?
• Director of Infrastructure Train Signal, Inc -the leader in Professional IT video training
courses
• Over 15 years in enterprise infrastructure
management and years of real-world
virtualization experience
• Have obtained the following certifications:
CCIE#9369, VCP, MCSE and CISSP
Who Is David Davis?
• Author of six video training courses and
hundreds of articles for well-known websites
such as: SearchVMware.com and
VirtualizationAdmin.com
• Best known for my Train Signal VMware
ESX Server video training course
• Best of VMworld 2008 Awards Judge
• Company website: www.TrainSignal.com
• Personal website: www.VMwareVideos.com
Abstract
• Worries over the availability of virtual
infrastructures are being put to rest by rapid
improvements in virtual high availability (HA).
• It’s time for many organizations to update
their virtual HA architectures and implement
state of the art IT best practices.
Abstract
• In this session, HA best practices for
virtualization are covered, along with available
tools that allow organizations to take their
virtual infrastructures beyond simple failover
to application level orchestration and
automation.
• We will cover high availability options and best
practices, load balancing, localized HA,
geographical HA, third-party HA applications
and failover scenarios.
Abstract
• The following topics are also discussed in
this session:
•
What options are available to prevent
downtime when failures occur?
•
Understanding virtualization load balancing
and dynamic migration of virtual machines
•
Understanding virtualization high availability
and disaster recovery
What I Assume You Already Know
Assumptions…
• Good understanding of server virtualization
concepts
• May or may not already be using virtualization
• Have, or will have, an application that
demands high availability
By The End Of The Session,
You’ll Know The Following:
• Understanding of HA components
• HA options like load balancing, localized and
Geo HA
• What is new in HA
• HA Tools in virtualization platforms
• Third-party products available for HA
• HA best practices for virtualization
FUD
• Do you have fear,
uncertainty and doubt
(FUD) about your server
availability? YES
• Does virtualization pile
more eggs in your one
basket? YES
• (Does that create more
FUD)? YES
• Can HA ease FUD? YES
FUD
Virtualization is great in test and dev,
but there’s no way I’m deploying
virtualization in production without a
high availability solution. If that
virtualization server goes down and I
don’t have a HA solution in place, I will
lose my job.
HA State Of The Union
• Just about everyone is using virtualization
• Most aren’t using virtualization to its full
ability
• That “ability” is expanding every day
• HA and Load Balancing are a huge benefit -are including and work with all apps
Understanding HA:
What is High Availability? Let’s define…
• High availability is a system design protocol
and associated implementation that ensures a
certain absolute degree of operational
continuity during a given measurement
period.
• In other words, you have low unplanned
downtime.
What Percent Are You “Available”?
Understanding HA
Virtualization Guest Encapsulation
Understanding HA
Virtualization Guest Encapsulation
Understanding HA -- Terminology
• Localized and Geographical High Availability
• Load balancing vs. resource scheduling
• Application vs. Server
• Clustering vs. Failover
Understanding HA -- VMware VMotion
Understanding HA -- VMware DRS
Understanding HA -- VMware HA (VMHA)
Understanding HA -- Components Of HA
• Software
•
Examples: VMHA, vLockStep, VMotion and
third-party
• Hardware
•
•
Shared storage -- SAN (iSCSI or Fibre
Channel)
Servers
Understanding HA -- Forms Of Clustering
Options Available To Prevent Downtime
• Host clustering / load balancing
•
•
Windows Server Clustering
Third-party
• Virtualization high availability
•
•
•
VMware High Availability and vLockStep
Microsoft Quick Migration
Third-party
What’s New With Virtualization
High Availability?
• VMware’s vLockStep
• Rumors of Microsoft Live Migration (Nessie)
• VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM)
• New third-party solutions
• Better use of HA features that you may
already have
• P2V HA Clustering
HA Tools: Using Windows Hyper-V
Quick And Live Migration
• Quick Migration -- guests moved but restarted
• Live Migration (coming soon) -- guests moved
and not restarted (competing with VMotion?)
• QM and LM compared at:
http://www.virtualizationteam.com/microsoft/hyper-v/livemigration-vs-quick-migration.html
• Today, no VMotion, SVMotion or VMHA
HA Tools: Using VMware
VMotion and SVMotion
• VMHA, DRS and Update Manager are
dependant on VMotion
• Nothing to configure but compatibility and
knowing the rules are important
• VMotion and SVMotion can be used manually
to prevent downtime
HA Tools: Using VMware VMHA
• Built into VMware and VI
• Easy to configure
• Can support all applications
• Guest VMs must restart
• Creates HA but still has downtime and
potential for application issues
HA Tools: Using VMware vLockStep
Virtual Lockstep
• For a given primary VM, run a
secondary VM on a different host
•
Sharing virtual disks with primary
• Secondary VM kept in “virtual
lockstep” via logging info sent over
private network connection
• Only primary VM sends and
receives network packets, secondary
is “Passive”
• If primary host fails, secondary VM
takes over with no interruption to
applications!
vLockStep info and graphics are thanks to VMware
HA Tools: Using VMware vLockStep
• vLockstep and HA features
work together
• Mission-critical VMs
protected by vLockStep and
VMHA, remaining VMs
protected by VMHA only
X
VMware FT
X
VMware FT
VMware FT
X
VMware HA
Resource Pool
vLockStep info and graphics are thanks to VMware
HA Tools: Using VMware vLockStep
1. User selects VM on which to enable FT
Virtual Lockstep
2. Secondary VM is automatically
created that shares disk with primary
3. When primary VM is powered on,
secondary VM is started on another
host via special kind of VMotion
4. Secondary VM keeps in virtual
lockstep
5. If the primary host goes down, the
secondary VM will “go live” and
become the primary VM
6. VMware HA automatically starts
another secondary VM to restore
redundancy
7. Secondary VM powers off when
primary does or when FT is disabled
vLockStep info and graphics are thanks to VMware
Third-Party Tools For HA:
Double Take for VMware Infrastructure
and Virtual Systems
• http://www.doubletake.com/products/virtualizatio
n/default.aspx
• INSERT INFO
Third-Party Tools For HA: Marathon
• http://www.marathontechnologies.com/fault_toler
ant_servers.html
• everRun for Server Virtualization -- Best of
Vmworld 2007 -- but for Citrix XenServer
• everRun for Windows Servers
• everRun for Geographical DR
• INSERT INFO
Third-Party Tools For HA: Neverfail For
VMware Virtual Center And Servers
• http://www.neverfailgroup.com/products/appmodules/vmwarevcenter.aspx
• INSERT INFO
Best Practices For Virtualization HA
• HA best practices for virtualization
• Gotchas -- for VM HA to work you must have
same CPU on each host or use CPU masking
** **
• INSERT INFO
Recommendations / Summary
• Virtualization + HA = Happiness
• HA will further virtualization adoption
• HA will provide business uptime
• HA will make life of the Admin better 
• Recommendation = Take action to learn
about and implement virtualization HA
Don’t Be This Guy…
Questions?
• If you think of more questions later, feel
free to email me at: david@trainsignal.com
• Or catch me on Twitter & Linkedin at:
www.twitter.com/davidmdavis
www.linkedin.com/in/davidmdavis
• To download a free portion of my training
video, visit www.TrainSignal.com
For More Information
• www.SearchVMware.com
• www.SearchServerVirtualization.com
• www.VirtualizationAdmin.com
• www.VMwareVideos.com
• www.TrainSignal.com -- VMHA video
• I’ll be available at the Ask-the-Expert booth
this afternoon
Questions?
Ask away…