Hi Paul, Timothy,
This is a great discussion,
and not as easy as we want. Of course do I want to use the best of both worlds.
Here some comments:
1)
Is it useful to run an exchange server on VMWare? In most of the
cases, Paul has maybe right. We have almost 8000 mailboxes, and indeed the
added value of VMWare is relative small. We use there snapdrive, snapmanager
and MSCS for the backup and DR job. We are running exchange on physical
machines. The only reason why I wood use VMWare is for standardisation, but the
disadvantages are today to big.
2)
But you have the same problem with ms SQL server. We have more than
70 SQL-servers. Here’s a really advantage to go to VMWare. That’s
what we are doing today. But at that moment I loose snapdrive and snapmanager.
This hurts. You go back to the stone age:
a.
My DBA can’t do anymore the basis storage tasks: create lun,
expland lun, take snapshots, … He must, like in the old days, go back to
my storage admin and ask him to do this tasks. No, this is not correct, it’s
much worse: he must go to my VMWare admin, to ask more diskspace and the VMWare
admin must go to my storage admin to solve the simple problem. So, my DBA is
not happy (he must wait) and also my storage admin is not happy (he must work
again). Only the VMWare admin likes this (but he will change his mind) because
he’s in control of everything J
b.
We have create a totally different DR and Backup procedure for our
SQL servers. It’s not as good as snapmanager for SQL. For standardisation
of procedures, we use the same scripts and procedures also on our large SQL
servers, those are running on physical machines.
3)
It’s paint full to see that two great product (VMWare and
ONTAP/WAFL), with almost the same philosophy (virtualisation of storage or
servers, easy of management, …), are not integrated on a higher level. The
combination works fine today, but you loose a lot of the WAFL functionality.
4)
iSCSI running in the virtual machine works fine, but it’s slow.
The latencies of the SQL server (and also the max IO/secs) are for most
applications (in our case) not good enough. So that’s not an option.
A nice discussion is also
the choose between raw devices or VMDK’s. I believe that you do a lot
more with your VMWare, if you can use raw devices on the netapp. The only
problem here is that there is a limit in VMWare of 254 luns in your VMWare “cluster”.
When you count a least 2 lun’s for each VM and we have more than 200 VM’s,
you see that you reach very fast that limit. I didn’t count the preferred
setup of my SQL DBA: he want 10 LUNs for every SQL server. So for me, this is
not an option. I have to use VMDK’s.
So Paul, I think a lot of
people are hoping that you will find a way to do this. Snapdrive would be a
great start, so that we can distinguish us again from the other guys who don’t
use netapp, and so that we just can come back in the modern times.
Ps: I prefer the Porsche RC3.
Best regards,
IT-Manager Infrastructure
& Operations
University Hospitals
Leuven -
Van:
owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] Namens Benn, Paul
Verzonden: woensdag 31 januari 2007 4:06
Aan: Timothy Hollingworth;
toasters@mathworks.com
Onderwerp: RE: Netapp and
VMware... It's all so confusing!
Hi Timothy,
Having been an ASE certified master
mechanic in a past life, I can advise you that it
is indeed possible to have both of those cars as long as they
are kept as separate vehicles. It would real mess if you chopped those cars in
half and then welded them together into one new car. Think of all those
electrical splices and incompatible electronics! Then, of course, there's that
whole warranty and support thing. Who will you go to when the Acura leather
cracks?
> Or am I completely blind and missing something?
Well, just the fact that neither
SnapDrive nor SnapManager are supported with VMware. The only "virtual
server" - if you even want to call it that - that is supported
with these products is the Exchange virtual server that is created in
a Windows ("MSCS") cluster.
Another interesting question that may be
worth investigating prior to putting this into production is whether or
not Microsoft supports the use of Exchange on VMware. Here are a couple of
articles on that:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/897615/
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/320220/
It is not clear in your email what the
motivation is to go "virtual" for your Exchange server. If it is
for DR purposes, then there may be another way you can
accomplish your goals. There is a solution documented in NetApp Knowledgebase
article #10542 that takes advantage of the virtual server in Windows
clustering. Perhaps this article will help you accomplish your goals?
http://now.netapp.com/Knowledgebase/solutionarea.asp?id=kb10542
Please let us know if you have any more
questions.
Regards,
Paul Benn
SnapManager Development Team
NetApp