EMC VSPEX PRIVATE CLOUD

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EMC VSPEX

Abstract

This document describes the EMC VSPEX Proven Infrastructure solution for private cloud deployments with Microsoft Hyper-V and EMC VNXe for up to 100 virtual machines using iSCSI Storage.

March, 2013

EMC

^®

VSPEX

^™

PRIVATE CLOUD

Microsoft^® Windows^® Server 2012 with Hyper-V^™ for up to 100 Virtual Machines

Enabled by EMC VNXe^™ and EMC Next-Generation Backup

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Published March 2013

EMC believes the information in this publication is accurate of its publication date.

The information is subject to change without notice.

The information in this publication is provided as is. EMC Corporation makes no representations or warranties of any kind with respect to the information in this publication, and specifically disclaims implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Use, copying, and distribution of any EMC software described in this publication requires an applicable software license.

EMC², EMC, and the EMC logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.

For the most up-to-date regulatory document for your product line, go to the technical documentation and advisories section on the EMC online support website.

Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V for up to 100 Virtual Machines Enabled by EMC VNXe and EMC Next-Generation Backup

Part Number H11330.1

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Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V for up to 100 Virtual Machines

Enabled by EMC VNXe and EMC Next-Generation Backup 3

Contents

Chapter 1 Executive Summary 13

Introduction ... 14

Target audience ... 14

Document purpose ... 14

Business needs ... 15

Chapter 2 Solution Overview 17 Introduction ... 18

Virtualization ... 18

Compute ... 18

Network ... 18

Storage ... 19

Chapter 3 Solution Technology Overview 21 Overview ... 22

Summary of key components ... 23

Overview ... 24

Microsoft Hyper-V ... 24

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) ... 24

High Availability with Hyper-V Failover Clustering ... 24

EMC Storage Integrator ... 25

Compute ... 25

Network ... 27

Overview ... 27

Storage ... 28

Overview ... 28

EMC VNXe series ... 28

Backup and recovery ... 29

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EMC NetWorker ... 29

EMC Avamar ... 29

Other technologies ... 29

EMC XtemSW Cache (Optional) ... 30

Chapter 4 Solution Architecture Overview 33 Solution overview ... 34

Solution architecture ... 34

Overview ... 34

Architecture for up to 50 virtual machines ... 35

Architecture for up to 100 virtual machines ... 35

Key components ... 36

Hardware resources ... 37

Software resources ... 39

Server configuration guidelines ... 39

Overview ... 39

Hyper-V memory virtualization ... 39

Memory configuration guidelines ... 41

Network configuration guidelines ... 42

Overview ... 42

VLAN ... 42

MC/S ... 43

Storage configuration guidelines ... 44

Overview ... 44

Hyper-V storage virtualization for VSPEX ... 44

Storage layout for 50 virtual machines ... 46

Storage layout for 100 virtual machines ... 47

High availability and failover ... 48

Overview ... 48

Virtualization layer ... 48

Compute layer ... 48

Network layer ... 49

Storage layer ... 50

Backup and recovery configuration guidelines ... 51

Overview ... 51

Backup characteristics ... 51

Backup layout for virtual machines ... 52

Sizing guidelines ... 52

Reference workload ... 52

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Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V for up to 100 Virtual Machines Enabled by EMC VNXe and EMC Next-Generation Backup 5

Defining the reference workload ... 53

Applying the reference workload ... 53

Overview ... 53

Example 1: Custom-built application... 53

Example 2: Point of sale system ... 54

Example 3: Web server ... 54

Example 4: Decision-support database ... 54

Summary of examples ... 55

Implementing the reference architectures ... 55

Overview ... 55

Resource types ... 56

CPU resources ... 56

Memory resources... 56

Network resources ... 56

Storage resources ... 57

Implementation summary ... 57

Quick assessment ... 58

Overview ... 58

CPU requirements ... 58

Memory requirements ... 58

Storage performance requirements ... 59

I/O operations per second (IOPs) ... 59

I/O size ... 59

I/O latency ... 59

Storage capacity requirements ... 60

Determining equivalent Reference virtual machines ... 60

Fine tuning hardware resources ... 63

Chapter 5 VSPEX Configuration Guidelines 67 Overview ... 68

Pre-deployment tasks ... 69

Overview ... 69

Deployment prerequisites ... 69

Customer configuration data ... 71

Prepare switches, connect network, and configure switches ... 71

Overview ... 71

Configure infrastructure network ... 71

Configure VLANs ... 72

Complete network cabling ... 72

Prepare and configure storage array ... 73

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Overview ... 73

VNXe configuration ... 73

Provision storage for iSCSI datastores ... 74

Install and configure Hyper-V hosts ... 75

Overview ... 75

Install Hyper-V and configure failover clustering ... 76

Configure Windows host networking ... 76

Publish VNXe datastores to Hyper-V ... 76

Connect Hyper-V datastores ... 76

Plan virtual machine memory allocations ... 76

Install and configure SQL server database ... 78

Overview ... 78

Create a virtual machine for Microsoft SQL server... 78

Install Microsoft Windows on the virtual machine ... 78

Install SQL Server ... 79

Configure SQL Server for SCVMM ... 79

System Center Virtual Machine Manager server deployment ... 80

Overview ... 80

Create a SCVMM host virtual machine ... 81

Install the SCVMM guest OS ... 81

Install the SCVMM server ... 81

Install the SCVMM Management Console ... 81

Install the SCVMM agent locally on a host ... 81

Add a Hyper-V cluster into SCVMM ... 81

Create a virtual machine in SCVMM ... 81

Create a template virtual machine ... 81

Deploy virtual machines from the template virtual machine ... 82

Summary ... 82

Chapter 6 Validating the Solution 83 Overview ... 84

Post-install checklist ... 85

Deploy and test a single virtual server ... 85

Verify the redundancy of the solution components ... 85

Appendix A Bill of Materials 87 Bill of materials ... 88

Appendix B Customer Configuration Data Sheet 91 Customer configuration data sheet ... 92

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Appendix C References 95

References ... 96

EMC documentation ... 96

Other documentation ... 96

Appendix D About VSPEX 97 About VSPEX ... 98

Appendix E Validation with Microsoft Hyper-V Fast Track v3 99 Overview ... 100

Business case for validation ... 100

Process requirements ... 101

Step one: Core prerequisites ... 101

Step two: Select the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure platform ... 101

Step three: Define additional Microsoft Hyper-V Fast Track Program components101 Step four: Build a detailed Bill of Materials ... 103

Step five: Test the environment ... 103

Step six: Document and publish the solution ... 103

Additional resources ... 103

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Figures

Figure 1. VSPEX private cloud components ... 22

Figure 2. Compute layer flexibility ... 26

Figure 3. Example of a highly available network design... 27

Figure 4. Logical architecture for 50 virtual machines ... 35

Figure 5. Logical architecture for 100 virtual machines ... 35

Figure 6. Hypervisor memory consumption ... 40

Figure 7. Required networks ... 43

Figure 8. Hyper-V virtual disk types ... 45

Figure 9. Storage layout for 50 virtual machines ... 46

Figure 10. Storage layout for 100 virtual machines ... 47

Figure 11. High Availability at the virtualization layer ... 48

Figure 12. Redundant power supplies ... 48

Figure 13. Network layer High Availability ... 49

Figure 14. VNXe series High Availability ... 50

Figure 15. Resource pool flexibility ... 55

Figure 16. Required resource from the Reference virtual machine pool ... 61

Figure 17. Aggregate resource requirements from the Reference virtual machine pool ... 63

Figure 18. Customizing server resources ... 64

Figure 19. Sample Ethernet network architecture ... 72

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Tables

Table 1. VNXe customer benefits ... 28

Table 2. Solution hardware ... 37

Table 3. Solution software ... 39

Table 4. Network hardware ... 42

Table 5. Storage hardware ... 44

Table 6. Backup profile characteristics ... 51

Table 7. Virtual machine characteristics... 53

Table 8. Blank worksheet row ... 58

Table 9. Reference virtual machine resources ... 60

Table 10. Example worksheet row ... 61

Table 11. Example applications ... 62

Table 12. Server resource component totals ... 64

Table 13. Blank customer worksheet ... 66

Table 14. Deployment process overview ... 68

Table 15. Tasks for pre-deployment ... 69

Table 16. Deployment prerequisites checklist ... 70

Table 17. Tasks for switch and network configuration ... 71

Table 18. Tasks for storage configuration ... 73

Table 19. Tasks for server installation ... 75

Table 20. Tasks for SQL server database setup ... 78

Table 21. Tasks for SCVMM configuration ... 80

Table 22. Tasks for testing the installation ... 84

Table 23. List of components used in the VSPEX solution for 50 virtual machines ... 88

Table 24. List of components used in the VSPEX solution for 100 virtual machines ... 89

Table 25. Common server information ... 92

Table 26. Hyper-V server information ... 92

Table 27. Array information ... 93

Table 28. Network infrastructure information ... 93

Table 29. VLAN information ... 93

Table 30. Service accounts ... 93

Table 31. Hyper-V Fast Track component classification ... 101

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Chapter 1 Executive Summary

This chapter presents the following topics:

Introduction... 14

Target audience ... 14

Document purpose ... 14

Business needs ... 15

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Introduction

VSPEX validated and modular architectures are built with proven best-of-breed technologies to create complete virtualization solutions on compute, networking, and storage layers. VSPEX helps to reduce virtualization planning and configuration burdens. When embarking on server virtualization, virtual desktop deployment, or IT consolidation, VSPEX accelerates your IT Transformation by enabling faster

deployments, choice, greater efficiency, and lower risk.

This document is a comprehensive guide to the technical aspects of this solution.

Server capacity is provided in generic terms for required minimums of CPU, memory, and network interfaces; the customer can select the server and networking hardware that meet or exceed the stated minimums.

Target audience

The reader of this document should have the necessary training and background to install and configure Microsoft Hyper-V, EMC VNXe series storage systems, and associated infrastructure as required by this implementation. The document provides external references where applicable. The reader should be familiar with these documents.

Readers should also be familiar with the infrastructure and database security policies of the customer installation.

Users focusing on selling and sizing a Microsoft Hyper-V private cloud infrastructure should pay particular attention to the first four chapters of this document. After purchase, implementers of the solution can focus on the configuration guidelines in Chapter 5, the solution validation in Chapter 6, and the appropriate references and appendices.

Document purpose

This document serves as an initial introduction to the VSPEX architecture, an explanation on how to modify the architecture for specific engagements and instructions on how to deploy the system effectively.

The VSPEX private cloud architecture provides the customer with a modern system capable of hosting a large number of virtual machines at a consistent performance level. This solution runs on the Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization layer backed by the highly available VNX^™ family storage. The compute and network components are customer-definable, and should be redundant and sufficiently powerful to handle the processing and data needs of the virtual machine environment.

The 50 and 100 virtual machines environments are based on a defined reference workload. Because not every virtual machine has the same requirements, this document contains methods and guidance to adjust your system to be cost-effective when deployed.

A private cloud architecture is a complex system offering. This document facilitates

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Enabled by EMC VNXe and EMC Next-Generation Backup 15 sizing guidance and worksheets, and verified deployment steps. When the last

component is installed, there are validation tests to ensure that your system is up and running properly. Following this document ensures an efficient and painless journey to the cloud.

Business needs

Customers require a scalable, tiered, and highly available infrastructure on which to deploy their business and mission-critical applications. Several new technologies are available to assist customers in consolidating and virtualizing their server

infrastructure, but customers need to know how to use these technologies to

maximize the investment, support service-level agreements, and reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO).

This solution addresses the following challenges:

 Availability: Stand-alone servers incur downtime for maintenance or

unexpected failures. Clusters of redundant stand-alone nodes are inefficient in the use of CPU, disk, and memory resources.

 Server management and maintenance: Individually maintained servers require significant repetitive activities for monitoring, problem resolution, patching, and other common activities. Therefore, the maintenance is labor intensive, costly, error-prone, and inefficient. Security, downtime, and outage risks are elevated.

 Ease of solution deployment: While small and medium businesses (SMB) must address the same IT challenges as larger enterprises, the staffing levels, experience, and training are generally more limited. IT generalists are often responsible for managing the entire IT infrastructure, and reliance is placed on third-party sources for maintenance or other tasks. The perceived

complexity of the IT function raises fear of risk and may block the adoption of new technology. Therefore, the simplicity of deployment and management are highly valued.

 Storage efficiency: Storage that is added locally to physical servers or provisioned directly from a shared resource or array often leads to over- provisioning and waste.

 Backup: Traditional backup approaches are slow and frequently unreliable.

There tends to be inflection points (or plateaus) in the virtualization adoption curve when the number of virtual machines increases from a few to 100 or more. With a few virtual machines, the situation can be manageable and most organizations can get by with existing tools and processes. However, when the virtual environment grows, the backup and recovery processes often become the limiting factors in the deployment.

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Chapter 2 Solution Overview

Introduction... 18

Compute ... 18

Network ... 18

Storage ... 19

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Introduction

The EMC VSPEX private cloud for Microsoft Hyper-V solution provides complete system architecture capable of supporting up to 100 virtual machines with a redundant server/network topology and highly available storage. The core

components that make up this particular solution are virtualization, storage, server, compute, and networking.

Virtualization

Microsoft Hyper-V is a leading virtualization platform in the industry. For years, Hyper- V provides flexibility and cost savings to end users by consolidating large, inefficient server farms into nimble, reliable cloud infrastructures.

Features like Live Migration which enables a virtual machine to move between different servers with no disruption to the guest operating system, and Dynamic Optimization which performs Live Migration automatically to balance loads, make Hyper-V a solid business choice.

With the release of Windows Server 2012, a Microsoft virtualized environment can host virtual machines with up to 64 virtual CPUs and 1 TB of virtual RAM.

Compute

VSPEX provides the flexibility to design and implement your choice of server components. The infrastructure must conform to the following attributes:

 Sufficient processor cores and memory to support the required number and types of virtual machines

 Sufficient network connections to enable redundant connectivity to the system switches

 Excess capacity to withstand a server failure and failover in the environment

Network

VSPEX provides the flexibility to design and implement your choice of network components. The infrastructure must conform to the following attributes:

 Redundant network links for the hosts, switches, and storage.

 Support for Multiple Connections per Session.

 Traffic isolation based on industry-accepted best practices.

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Storage

The EMC VNX storage family is the leading shared storage platform in the industry.

VNX provides both file and block access with a broad feature set which makes it an ideal choice for any private cloud implementation.

The following VNXe storage components are sized for the stated reference architecture workload:

 Host adapter ports – Provide host connectivity via fabric into the array.

 Storage Processors – The compute components of the storage array, which are used for all aspects of data moving into, out of, and between arrays along with protocol support.

 Disk drives – Disk spindles that contain the host/application data and their enclosures.

The 50 and 100 virtual machine Hyper-V private cloud solutions discussed in this document are based on the VNXe3150^™ and VNXe3300^™ storage arrays respectively.

VNXe3150 can support a maximum of 100 drives and VNXe3300 can host up to 150 drives.

The EMC VNXe series supports a wide range of business class features ideal for the private cloud environment, including:

 Thin Provisioning

 Replication

 Snapshots

 File Deduplication and Compression

 Quota Management

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Chapter 3 Solution Technology Overview

Overview ... 22

Summary of key components ... 23

Compute ... 25

Network ... 27

Storage ... 28

Backup and recovery ... 29

Other technologies ... 29

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Overview

This solution uses the EMC VNXe series and Microsoft Hyper-V to provide storage and server hardware consolidation in a private cloud. The new virtualized infrastructure is centrally managed to provide efficient deployment and management of a scalable number of virtual machines and associated shared storage.

Figure 1 depicts the general solution components.

Figure 1. VSPEX private cloud components

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Summary of key components

This section briefly describes the key components of this solution.

 Virtualization

The virtualization layer enables the physical implementation of resources to be decoupled from the applications that use them. In other words, the application view of the available resources is no longer directly tied to the hardware. This enables many key features in the private cloud concept.

 Compute

The compute layer provides memory and processing resources for the virtualization layer software, and for the needs of the applications running within the private cloud. The VSPEX program defines the minimum amount of compute layer resources required, and enables the customer to implement the requirements using any server hardware that meets these requirements.

 Network

The network layer connects the users of the private cloud to the resources in the cloud, and the storage layer to the compute layer. The VSPEX program defines the minimum number of network ports required for the solution, provides general guidance on network architecture, and allows the customer to implement the requirements using any network hardware that meets these requirements.

 Storage

The storage layer is critical for the implementation of the private cloud. With multiple hosts to access shared data, many of the use cases defined in the private cloud concept can be implemented. The EMC VNXe storage family used in this solution provides high-performance data storage while maintaining high availability.

 Backup and recovery

The optional backup and recovery components of the solution provide data protection when the data in the primary system is deleted, damaged, or otherwise unusable.

The Solution architecture section provides details on all the components that make up the reference architecture.

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Virtualization

Virtualization enables greater flexibility in the application layer by potentially eliminating hardware downtime for maintenance, and enabling the physical capability of the system to change without affecting the hosted applications. In a server virtualization or private cloud use case, it enables multiple independent virtual machines to share the same physical hardware, rather than being directly

implemented on dedicated hardware.

Microsoft Hyper-V, a Windows Server role that was introduced in Windows Server 2008, transforms or virtualizes computer hardware resources, including CPU, memory, storage and network. This transformation creates fully functional virtual machines that run their own operating systems and applications just like physical computers.

Hyper-V and Failover Clustering provide a high-availability virtualized infrastructure along with Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs). Live Migration and Live Storage Migration enable seamless migration of virtual machines from one Hyper-V server to another and stored files from one storage system to another, with minimal performance impact.

SCVMM is a centralized management platform for the virtualized datacenter. With SCVMM, administrators can configure and manage the virtualization host,

networking, and storage resources in order to create and deploy virtual machines and services to private clouds. When deployed, SCVMM greatly simplifies provisioning, management and monitoring of the Hyper-V environment.

Hyper-V achieves high availability by using the Windows Server 2012 Failover Clustering feature. High availability is impacted by both planned and unplanned downtime, and Failover Clustering can significantly increase the availability of virtual machines in both situations. Windows Server 2012 Failover Clustering is configured on the Hyper-V host so that virtual machines can be monitored for health and moved between nodes of the cluster. This configuration has the following key advantages:

 If the physical host server that Hyper-V and the virtual machines are running on must be updated, changed, or rebooted, the virtual machines can be moved to other nodes of the cluster. You can move the virtual machines back after the original physical host server is back to service.

 If the physical host server that Hyper-V and the virtual machines are running on fails or is significantly degraded, the other members of the Windows Failover Cluster take over the ownership of the virtual machines and bring them online automatically.

 If the virtual machine fails, it can be restarted on the same host server or moved to another host server. Since Windows 2012 Server Failover Cluster detects this failure, it automatically takes recovery steps based on the settings in the resource properties of the virtual machine. Downtime is minimized because of the detection and recovery automation.

Overview

Microsoft Hyper-V

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM)

High Availability with Hyper-V Failover Clustering

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Enabled by EMC VNXe and EMC Next-Generation Backup 25 EMC Storage Integrator (ESI) is an agent-less, no-charge plug-in that enables

application-aware storage provisioning for Microsoft Windows server applications, Hyper-V, VMware, and Xen Server environments. Administrators can easily provision block and file storage for Microsoft Windows or for Microsoft SharePoint sites by using wizards in ESI. ESI supports the following functions:

 Provisioning, formatting, and presenting drives to Windows servers

 Provisioning new cluster disks and adding them to the cluster automatically

 Provisioning shared CIFS storage and mounting it to Windows servers

 Provisioning SharePoint storage, sites, and databases in a single wizard

Compute

The choice of a server platform for an EMC VSPEX infrastructure is not only based on the technical requirements of the environment, but on the supportability of the platform, existing relationships with the server provider, advanced performance and management features, and many other factors. For this reason, EMC VSPEX solutions are designed to run on a wide variety of server platforms. Instead of requiring a given number of servers with a specific set of requirements, VSPEX documents a number of processor cores and an amount of RAM that must be achieved. This can be

implemented with 2 or 20 servers and still be considered the same VSPEX solution.

In the example shown in Figure 2, assume that the compute layer requirements for a given implementation are 25 processor cores, and 200 GB of RAM. One customer might want to implement this solution using white-box servers containing 16 processor cores and 64 GB of RAM, while a second customer chooses a higher-end server with 20 processor cores and 144 GB of RAM.

The first customer needs four of the servers they chose, while the second customer needs two.

EMC Storage Integrator

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Figure 2. Compute layer flexibility

Note To enable high availability at the compute layer, each customer needs one additional server to ensure that the system can maintain business operations if a server fails.

The following best practices apply to the compute layer:

 Use a number of identical or at least compatible servers. VSPEX implements hypervisor level high-availability technologies that may require similar

instruction sets on the underlying physical hardware. By implementing VSPEX on identical server units, you can minimize compatibility problems in this area.

 When implementing high availability on the hypervisor layer, the largest virtual machine you can create is constrained by the smallest physical server in the environment.

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 Implement the available high availability features in the virtualization layer, and ensure that the compute layer has sufficient resources to accommodate at least single-server failures. This enables the implementation of minimal- downtime upgrades and tolerance for single-unit failures.

Within the boundaries of these recommendations and best practices, the compute layer for EMC VSPEX can be flexible to meet your specific needs. The key constraint is that you provide sufficient processor cores and RAM per core to meet the needs of the target environment.

Network

The infrastructure network requires redundant network links for each Hyper-V host, the storage array, the switch interconnect ports, and the switch uplink ports. This configuration provides both redundancy and additional network bandwidth. This configuration is required regardless of whether the network infrastructure for the solution already exists, or is being deployed alongside other components of the solution. Figure 3 shows an example of the highly available network topology.

Figure 3. Example of a highly available network design Overview

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This validated solution uses virtual local area networks (VLANs) to segregate network traffic of various types to improve throughput, manageability, application separation, high availability, and security.

MC/S (Multiple Connections per Session) is a feature of the iSCSI protocol, which enables combining several connections inside a single session for performance and failover purposes. EMC VNXe series supports MC/S. In this solution, MC/S is

configured to provide redundancy and load balancing.

Storage

The storage layer is also a key component of any Cloud Infrastructure solution that stores and serves data generated by application and operating systems within the datacenter. A centralized storage platform often increases storage efficiency, management flexibility, and reduces total cost of ownership. In this VSPEX solution, EMC VNXe Series is used for providing virtualization at the storage layer.

EMC VNX family is optimized for virtual applications delivering industry-leading innovation and enterprise capabilities for file and block storage in a scalable, easy- to-use solution. This next-generation storage platform combines powerful and flexible hardware with advanced efficiency, management, and protection software to meet the demanding needs of today’s enterprises.

The VNXe series is powered by the Intel Xeon processors, for intelligent storage that automatically and efficiently scales in performance, while ensuring data integrity and security.

The VNXe series is built for IT managers in smaller environments and the VNX series is designed to meet the high-performance, high-scalability requirements of midsize and large enterprises.

Table 1. VNXe customer benefits Feature

Next-generation unified storage, optimized for virtualized applications



Capacity optimization features including compression,

deduplication, thin provisioning, and application-centric copies



High availability, designed to deliver five 9s availability  Simplified management with EMC Unisphere™ for a single

management interface for all network-attached storage (NAS), storage area network (SAN), and replication needs



Software Suites

 Local Protection Suite—Increases productivity with snapshots of production data.

Overview

EMC VNXe series

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 Remote Protection Suite—Protects data against localized failures, outages, and disasters.

 Application Protection Suite—Automates application copies and provides replica management.

 Security and Compliance Suite—Keeps data safe from changes, deletions, and malicious activity.

Software Packs

 VNXe Total Value Pack—Includes the Remote Protection, Application Protection and Security and Compliance Suite.

Backup and recovery

EMC’s NetWorker coupled with Data Domain deduplication storage systems seamlessly integrate into virtual environments, providing rapid backup and restoration capabilities. Data Domain deduplication results in vastly less data traversing the network by leveraging the Data Domain Boost technology, which greatly reduces the amount of data being backed up and stored, translating into storage, bandwidth, and operational savings.

The following are two of the most common recovery requests made to backup administrators:

 File-level recovery: Object-level recoveries account for the vast majority of user support requests. Common actions requiring file-level recovery are individual users deleting files, applications requiring recoveries, and batch process-related erasures.

 System recovery: Although complete system recovery requests are less frequent in number than those for file-level recovery, this bare metal restore capability is vital to the enterprise. Some common root causes for full system recovery requests are viral infestation, registry corruption, or unidentifiable unrecoverable issues.  

The NetWorker System State protection functionality adds backup and recovery capabilities in both of these scenarios.

EMC’s Avamar data deduplication technology seamlessly integrates into virtual environments, providing rapid backup and restoration capabilities. Avamar’s

deduplication results in less data travelling across the network, reduced quantities of data being backed up and stored, and savings in storage, bandwidth, and

operational costs.

Other technologies

In addition to the required technical components for EMC VSPEX solutions, other technologies may provide additional value depending on the specific use case.

EMC NetWorker

EMC Avamar

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EMC XtemSW Cache^TM is a server Flash caching solution that reduces latency and increases throughput to improve application performance by using intelligent caching software and PCIe Flash technology.

Server-side Flash caching for maximum speed

XtemSW Cache performs the following functions to improve system performance:

 Caches the most frequently referenced data on the server-based PCIe card to put the data closer to the application.

 Automatically adapts to changing workloads by determining which data is most frequently referenced and promoting it to the server Flash card. This means that the “hottest” data (most active data) automatically resides on the PCIe card in the server for faster access.

 Offloads the read traffic from the storage array, which allocates greater processing power to other applications. While one application is accelerated with XtemSW Cache, the array performance for other applications is

maintained or slightly enhanced.

Write-through caching to the array for total protection

XtemSW Cache accelerates reads and protects data by using a write-through cache to the storage to deliver persistent high availability, integrity, and disaster recovery supportability.

Application agnostic

XtemSW Cache is transparent to applications, so no rewriting, retesting, or recertification is required to deploy XtemSW Cache in the environment.

Minimum impact on system resources

Unlike other caching solutions on the market, XtemSW Cache does not require a significant amount of memory or CPU cycles, as all Flash and wear-leveling

management is done on the PCIe card without using server resources. Unlike other PCIe solutions, there is no significant overhead from using XtemSW Cache on server resources.

XtemSW Cache creates the most efficient and intelligent I/O path from the application to the datastore, which results in an infrastructure that is dynamically optimized for performance, intelligence, and protection for both physical and virtual environments.

XtemSW Cache active/passive clustering support

XtemSW Cache clustering scripts configuration ensures that stale data is never retrieved. The scripts use cluster management events to trigger a mechanism that purges the cache. The XtemSW Cache-enabled active/passive cluster ensures data integrity, and accelerates application performance.

XtemSW Cache performance considerations

The following are the XtemSW Cache performance considerations:

 On a write request, XtemSW Cache first writes to the array, then to the cache, EMC XtemSW

Cache (Optional)

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 On a read request, XtemSW Cache satisfies the request with cached data, or, when the data is not present, retrieves the data from the array, writes it to the cache, and then returns it to the application. The trip to the array can be in the order of milliseconds, therefore the array limits how fast the cache can work.

As the number of writes increases, XtemSW Cache performance decreases.

 XtemSW Cache is most effective for workloads with a 70 percent, or more, read/write ratio, with small, random I/O (8 K is ideal). I/O greater than 128 K will not be cached in XtemSW Cache v1.5.

Note For more information, refer to the XtemSW Cache Installation and Administration Guide v1.5.

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Chapter 4 Solution Architecture Overview

Solution overview ... 34 Solution architecture ... 34 Server configuration guidelines ... 39 Network configuration guidelines ... 42 Storage configuration guidelines ... 44 High availability and failover ... 48 Backup and recovery configuration guidelines ... 51 Sizing guidelines ... 52 Reference workload ... 52 Applying the reference workload ... 53 Implementing the reference architectures ... 55 Quick assessment ... 58

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Solution overview

VSPEX Proven Infrastructure solutions are built with proven best-of-breed

technologies to create a complete virtualization solution that enables you to make an informed decision when choosing and sizing the hypervisor, compute, networking, and storage layers. VSPEX eliminates virtualization planning and configuration burdens by leveraging extensive interoperability, functional, and performance testing by EMC. VSPEX accelerates your IT Transformation to cloud-based computing by enabling faster deployment, more choice, higher efficiency, and lower risk.

This section is intended to be a comprehensive guide to the major aspects of this solution. Server capacity is specified in generic terms for required minimums of CPU, memory, and network interfaces; the customer is free to select the server and

networking hardware that meet or exceed the stated minimums. The specified storage architecture, along with a system meeting the server and network

requirements outlined, is validated by EMC to provide high levels of performance while delivering a highly available architecture for your private cloud deployment.

Each VSPEX Proven Infrastructure balances the storage, network, and compute resources needed for a set number of virtual machines, which have been validated by EMC. In practice, each virtual machine has its own set of requirements that rarely fit a predefined idea of what a virtual machine should be. In any discussion about virtual infrastructures, it is important to first define a reference workload. Not all servers perform the same tasks, and it is impractical to build a reference that takes into account every possible combination of workload characteristics.

Solution architecture

The VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for Microsoft Hyper-V private clouds with EMC VNXe is validated at two different points of scale; one with up to 50 virtual machines, and the other with up to 100 virtual machines. The defined configurations form the basis of creating a custom solution.

Note VSPEX uses the concept of a Reference Workload to describe and define a virtual machine. Therefore, one physical or virtual server in an existing environment may not be equal to one virtual machine in a VSPEX solution.

Evaluate your workload in terms of the reference to achieve an appropriate point of scale.

Overview

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Enabled by EMC VNXe and EMC Next-Generation Backup 35 Figure 4 characterizes the validated infrastructure for up to 50 virtual machines.

Figure 4. Logical architecture for 50 virtual machines

Figure 5 characterizes the validated infrastructure for up to 100 virtual machines.

Figure 5. Logical architecture for 100 virtual machines

Note The networking components of either solution can be implemented using 1 Gb or 10 Gb IP networks, if sufficient bandwidth and redundancy meet the listed requirements.

Architecture for up to 50 virtual machines

Architecture for up to 100 virtual machines

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The architecture includes the following key components:

Microsoft Hyper-V—Provides a common virtualization layer to host a server environment. The specifics of the validated environment are listed in Table 2.

Hyper-V provides a highly available infrastructure through features such as:

 Live Migration — Provides live migration of virtual machines within a virtual infrastructure cluster, with no virtual machine downtime or service disruption.

 Live Storage Migration — Provides live migration of virtual machine disk files within and across storage arrays with no virtual machine downtime or service disruption.

 Failover Clustering High Availability (HA) – Detects and provides rapid recovery for a failed virtual machine in a cluster.

 Dynamic Optimization (DO) – Provides load balancing of computing capacity in a cluster with support of SCVMM.

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM)—SCVMM is not required for this solution. However, if deployed, it (or its corresponding function in Microsoft System Center Essentials) simplifies provisioning, management, and monitoring of the Hyper-V environment.

Microsoft SQL Server 2012—SCVMM, if used, requires a SQL Server database instance to store configuration and monitoring details.

DNS Server — DNS services are required for the various solution components to perform name resolution. The Microsoft DNS service running on a Windows Server 2012 is used.

Active Directory Server — Active Directory services are required for the various solution components to function properly. The Microsoft Active Directory Service running on a Windows Server 2012 is used.

IP Network—All network traffic is carried by standard Ethernet network with redundant cabling and switching. Users and management traffic are carried over a shared

network while storage traffic is carried over a private, non-routable subnet.

EMC VNXe 3150 array—Provides storage by presenting Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) datastores to Hyper-V hosts for up to 50 virtual machines.

EMC VNXe3300 array—Provides storage by presenting Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) datastores to Hyper-V hosts for up to 100 virtual machines.

These datastores for both deployment sizes are created by using application-aware wizards included in the EMC Unisphere interface.

VNXe series storage arrays include the following components:

 Storage Processors (SPs) support block and file data with UltraFlex^TM I/O technology that supports iSCSI, CIFS, and NFS protocols The SPs provide access for all external hosts and for the file side of the VNXe array.

 Battery backup units are battery units within each storage processor and provide enough power to each storage processor to ensure that any data in Key components

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Enabled by EMC VNXe and EMC Next-Generation Backup 37 flight is destaged to the vault area in the event of a power failure. This

ensures that no writes are lost. Upon restart of the array, the pending writes are reconciled and persisted.

 Disk-array Enclosures (DAE) house the drives used in the array.

Table 2 lists the hardware used in this solution.

Table 2. Solution hardware

Hardware Configuration Notes

Hyper-V servers Memory:

 2 GB RAM per virtual machine

 100 GB RAM across all servers for the 50- virtual-machine configuration

 200 GB RAM across all servers for the 100- virtual-machine configuration

 2 GB RAM reservation per host for hypervisor

CPU:

 One vCPU per virtual machine

 One to four vCPUs per physical core

Network:

 Two 10 GbE NIC ports per server Note To implement Microsoft Hyper-V High Availability (HA) functionality and to meet the listed minimums, the infrastructure should have one additional server.

Configured as a single Hyper-V cluster.

Network infrastructure

Minimum switching capacity:

 Two physical switches

 Two 10 GbE ports per Hyper-V server

 One 1 GbE port per storage processor for management Two 10 GbE ports per storage processor for data

Redundant LAN configuration Hardware

resources

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Hardware Configuration Notes

Storage Common:

 Two Storage Processors (active/active)

 Two 10GbE interfaces per storage processor for data

For 50 Virtual Machines

 EMC VNXe3150

 Forty-five 300 GB 15k RPM 3.5-inch SAS disks (9 * 300 GB 4+1 R5 Performance Drive Packs)

 Two 300 GB 15k RPM 3.5-inch SAS disks as hot spares

For 100 Virtual Machines

 EMC VNXe3300

 Seventy-seven 300 GB 15k RPM 3.5-inch SAS disks (11 * 300 GB 6+1 R5

Performance Drive Packs)

 Three 300 GB 15k RPM 3.5-inch SAS disks as hot spares

Include the initial disk pack on the VNXe.

Shared

infrastructure In most cases, a customer environment will already have configured the infrastructure services such as Active Directory, DNS, and other services.

The setup of these services is beyond the scope of this document.

If this configuration is being implemented with non-existing infrastructure, a minimum number of additional servers is required:

 Two physical servers

 16 GB RAM per server

 Four processor cores per server

 Two 10 GbE ports per server

These servers and the roles they fulfill may already exist in the customer environment;

however, they must exist before VSPEX is

deployed.

EMC Next- Generation Backup

For 50 virtual machines

 Three DD160 Factory

For 100 virtual machines

 One Avamar Business Edition

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Enabled by EMC VNXe and EMC Next-Generation Backup 39 Table 3 lists the software used in this solution.

Table 3. Solution software

Software Configuration

Microsoft Hyper-V

Operating system for Hyper-V hosts Windows 2012 Datacenter Edition

(Datacenter Edition is necessary to support the number of virtual machines in this solution) System Center Virtual Machine

Manager

Version 2012 SP1

Microsoft SQL Server Version 2012 Enterprise Edition VNXe

Software version 2.2.0.16150

Next-Generation Backup

NetWorker 8.0 SP1 – for 50 virtual machines

Avamar 6.1 SP1 – for 100 virtual machines

Data Domain OS 5.2 – for 50 virtual machines

Server configuration guidelines

When designing and ordering the compute/server layer of the VSPEX solution, several factors may alter the final purchase. From a virtualization perspective, if a system workload is well estimated, features like Dynamic Memory and Smart Paging can reduce the aggregate memory requirement.

If the virtual machine pool does not have a high level of peak or concurrent usage, the number of vCPUs may be reduced. Conversely, if the applications being deployed are highly computational in nature, the number of CPUs and memory to be purchased may need to increase.

Microsoft Hyper-V has a number of advanced features that help to maximize

performance and overall resource utilization. The most important of these are in the area of memory management. This section describes some of these features and the items to consider in the environment.

In general, you can consider virtual machines on a single hypervisor consuming memory as a pool of resources. Figure 6 is an example.

Software resources

Overview

Hyper-V memory virtualization

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Figure 6. Hypervisor memory consumption

This basic concept is enhanced by understanding the technologies presented in this section.

Dynamic Memory

Dynamic Memory, which was introduced in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, increases physical memory efficiency by treating memory as shared resources and allocating it to the virtual machines dynamically. Actual used memory of each virtual machine is adjusted on demand. Dynamic Memory enables more virtual machines to run by reclaiming unused memory from idle virtual machines. In Windows Server 2012, Dynamic Memory enables the dynamic increase of the maximum memory available to virtual machines.

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Enabled by EMC VNXe and EMC Next-Generation Backup 41 Smart Paging

Even with Dynamic Memory, Hyper-V allows more virtual machines than physical available memory. There is most likely a memory gap between minimum memory and startup memory. Smart Paging is a memory management technique that leverages disk resources as temporary memory replacement. It swaps out less-used memory to disk storage and swap in when needed, which may cause performance to degrade as a drawback. Hyper-V continues to leverage the guest paging when the host memory is oversubscribed, as it is more efficient than Smart Paging.

Non-Uniform Memory Access

Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) is a multi-node computer technology that enables a CPU to access remote-node memory. This type of memory access is costly in terms of performance, so Windows Server 2012 employs a process known as processor affinity, which strives to keep threads pinned to a particular CPU to avoid remote-node memory access. In previous versions of Windows, this feature is only available to the host. Windows Server 2012 extends this functionality into the virtual machines, which can now realize improved performance in SMP environments.

This section provides guidelines to configure server memory for this solution. The guidelines take into account Hyper-V memory overhead and the virtual machine memory settings.

Hyper-V memory overhead

Virtualized memory has some associated overhead, which includes the memory consumed by Hyper-V, the parent partition, and additional overhead for each virtual machine. Leave at least 2 GB memory for Hyper-V parent partition for this solution.

Virtual machine memory

In this solution, each virtual machine gets 2 GB memory in fixed mode.

Memory configuration guidelines