Nine steps to teach you to successfully deploy a virtualization project

Projects involving virtualized deployments often include a large number of devices in the data center, from servers, storage, and networks to your security and management software. This article describes the nine major steps in a virtualized deployment project to standardize the entire installation process.

Eric Siebert, a virtualization expert, covered various virtualization deployments in his article, "Virtualization Deployment: The Assessment and Planning Phases." Below I will expand and describe each step he describes, as well as additional considerations and issues that need to be clarified.

- Building a virtual environment. In this step, install the server, mount the selected hypervisor (such as ESX Server or Hyper-V), install the central management platform (Microsoft's SCVMM or VMware's vCenter), and finally add the virtual host to the management platform. in.

- Configure the virtual environment. In this step, configure the server's static IP address, correct the network system parameters, and configure the VLAN if necessary.

- Security for virtual environments. In this step, set up a complex login password for all virtual hosts, add groups to the Windows AD server, add the newly added, authenticated VMware administrator to the group, and then authenticate the group as The administrator of VMware vCenter and delete the domain management account. If you have other types of users who need to manage their virtual machines (such as SQL administrators or development environments), consider adding additional groups and new roles.

- The construction of a virtual environment. In this step, complete the addition of a new virtual machine to the virtual infrastructure, either by creating a new virtual machine and installing a brand new operating system, or by means of tools such as VMware's Converter Enterprise (described in Part 2). Physical machine to virtual machine (P2V) conversion and downloading virtual applications from the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace. Please choose the conversion method for your P2V migration.

- Monitoring of the virtual environment. In this step, at least you will want to be able to monitor the new virtualization host through basic management tools, which can be achieved with the simple graphical interface provided in the free ESXi Server and vSphere Client. Further, you might also want to use some of the advanced performance management monitoring provided by vCenter. By setting, you can notify the specified administrator when a performance problem occurs. As you get used to it, you'll probably want to use more sophisticated performance monitoring tools, as we mentioned in "Management Tools Choices."

- Maintenance of the virtual environment. Maintenance is a very simple task in an environment with a single virtual host and a set of virtual machines. But if your system architecture is expanded, maintenance tools will be used. Please don't confuse the concept of virtual environment monitoring. The main task in the maintenance phase is the management of the patch. Fortunately, if you are sourcing VMware vSphere, Update Manager is included in all commercial versions. With Update Manager, you can manage patch upgrades for existing ESX servers, including patch upgrades that can involve some operating systems and some applications. If you also use VMware's DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler) feature, ESX Server can be upgraded without downtime.

- Backup of the virtual environment. As with physical servers, it is extremely important to build a backup mechanism for virtual servers. When you complete the virtualization of the physical server, an effective backup mechanism needs to be completed on the same day. Although virtual machine backup can also be achieved through existing traditional backup software, this is not the best choice for virtual environment backup. By adopting backup software customized for virtual machines, they can grasp which physical host all virtual machines are on, and then identify when it is necessary to migrate the virtual machine to the new host. These backup software can support Microsoft's VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Service) to ensure continuous backup of applications and provide some special additional features, such as file-level and mirror-level backup, deduplication and data replication. Typical virtualized environment-specific backup software includes: VMware's Data Recovery, Veeam Software's Backup, and Vizioncore vRanger.

- Troubleshooting the virtual environment. We certainly hope that we will not encounter any problems after the new deployment of the virtualization architecture. But if the problem occurs, we need documentation and diagrams about the virtualized environment. There is also a need for all devices—server, SAN, network, storage, and virtual software—and related, after-sales support information and contact windows.

- Training and documentation. Although this last step was not mentioned in Siebert's article, training and documentation are also an important step in completing a successful deployment. All good deployment plans should include training for other administrators in the company and documentation on the new virtualization architecture and day-to-day management tasks. Although for other administrators, virtual servers may not be used much differently than physics. But the management and troubleshooting of virtual machines is completely different from physical machines. Therefore, training courses are required so that support staff and key administrators can understand the changes in the physical system architecture they face and how to do the same work in the virtual machine environment.

Avoiding Traps in Virtualized Deployments

Although you only follow the installation plan based on the above installation steps, you can avoid problems in virtualization deployment, but there are still some traps. Need to pay attention to the installation. Let's take an example to illustrate some similar issues:

- Underestimate the amount of memory required for a virtualization host. Although you are using VMware's memory over-allocation technology, it is likely that the virtualization host in your production environment will use the total amount of memory installed. Many virtualization hosts used in production environments have 16GB or more of memory installed.

- Underestimated the storage space required for shared storage. Although the new version of VMware provides thin provisioning to help users reduce the storage footprint of virtualization, virtual machines quickly consume large amounts of storage in shared storage. If possible, use VMware's thin provisioning or use SAN storage to reduce hard disk space usage. You can also reclaim allocated storage by using Vizioncore's vOptimizer Pro tool.

- Virtualization is much faster than training and document collection. Virtualizing a physical server is easy and can be done in minutes, but training senior administrators and upgrading documents takes much longer than virtualization itself. So be sure to avoid virtualizing all physical environments at the same time, and then face a long virtual machine troubleshooting process. And virtualize some applications that are not licensed by the application administrator.

- Over-allocation. When initializing the installation, it is easy to over-provision the virtual machine because the process of creating a new virtual machine looks so simple. As with the management of physical servers, we should only allocate the virtual machines needed for those services. Each new virtual machine takes up additional server resources and brings additional operating system license purchases.

- Missing test. Testing for applications on virtual machines is as simple as moving from a physical machine to a VMware Workstation virtual machine and then verifying the results in the virtual machine. In my experience, 99% of applications can work on virtual machines, but keep an eye on image-intensive applications (such as running computer-aided design CAD on virtual desktops) or you need to purchase additional software licenses. application. After verifying the compatibility of the software, you also need to consider the support capabilities of the virtual machine architecture: whether it can meet the computing needs of the application and provide the same performance as the physical server.