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First time with virtualization - development lab mirroring live

W

wavewerx

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 8, 2008
Messages
284
I'm looking to mirror our live environment with a development environment. I figured virtualization would be the best way to go about this and would give me some experience with VMs as well. I've read alot about virtualization but haven't had the opportunity to use it at home.

I'm looking to mirror our three servers:

1 Server 2008 R2 'main' server - DHCP / AD / File / Print / etc
1 Server 2008 application server - ERP software, PDM software, CAD software, network software
1 Server 2008 database server - ERP database, PDM database

In addition to this, I'd have a few 'client' machines set up as well to test group policies and software settings before pushing them out to the live environment.

Comments on this approach? Any resources / guides to look up that demonstrate this sort of thing? I feel confident enough to dive right in but I'd like to hear what others are doing / have done for this sort of setup - a development / sandbox / testbed.
 
Grab ESXi and a server and go at it really :) You may need some decently quick drives in it for those DBs, depending on their load.
 
You have a simple setup with 3 VM's? what are you wondering about?

Also, what do you mean mirror? just have the same setup in your lab ?
 
lopoetve said:
Grab ESXi and a server and go at it really :) You may need some decently quick drives in it for those DBs, depending on their load.
Click to expand...

That's what I was thinking. Looking for those words of encouragement though. Thanks!

AMD_Gamer said:
You have a simple setup with 3 VM's? what are you wondering about?

Also, what do you mean mirror? just have the same setup in your lab ?
Click to expand...

I thought it was a pretty simple setup. When I say mirror exactly what you said - same setup in the lab.

I'm more just wondering what other folks do for a development environment. I think that's actually my core question.
 
One noobie mistake I made while testing DHCP was not separating the networks out.
I had production clients pulling IPs from the test DHCP server :eek:

This was on a default load of ESXi and only 1 physical NIC available.
 
+1 on the issues with multiple servers sharing 1 NIC. Try to see if you can get separate physical NICs for each client. If not, at least use VLANs to separate them. Makes troubleshooting much, much easier. And keep that DHCP server in an isolated broadcast domain if you don't want to start serving addresses to production machines from it!

ESXi will work great for you, but since your environment is 100% MS based, you should at least consider running hyper-V rather than ESXi. Not expressing a preference, but if your environment is all MS then (likely) so is all of the expertise in the shop that can help you.
 
Thanks for the comments guys - These are exactly the things I'm unprepared for and would probably be sitting there for days trying to figure out.

I'll definitely be checking out hyper-V. We are 100% MS based and I'm not looking to change that up too much. It's done everything we've needed it to do and more.
 
The one issue I had was the default ESXi format uses 1MB blocks, which limits you to 256GB partitions.

I fixed it the wrong way..... ;)
 
The above sounds fine. Ideally, you would have at least 2 environments. The first is a dev enviroment where you can screw it up as much as you like. Second would be a "live like" in which it is more controlled. You do your final testing in LL. With app developments these test environments can get endless but you get the picture. As you probably dont want to get too complicated backup regularly so you can regress to a previous state if something gets screwed up.

If you are more comfortable with Windows use Hyper-V - unless you want to learn something else of course :) But to me you'll have enough to do setting the dev environment up.
 
haileris said:
The above sounds fine. Ideally, you would have at least 2 environments. The first is a dev enviroment where you can screw it up as much as you like. Second would be a "live like" in which it is more controlled. You do your final testing in LL. With app developments these test environments can get endless but you get the picture. As you probably dont want to get too complicated backup regularly so you can regress to a previous state if something gets screwed up.

If you are more comfortable with Windows use Hyper-V - unless you want to learn something else of course :) But to me you'll have enough to do setting the dev environment up.
Click to expand...

Thanks haileris - Another point for Hyper-V. I'll be checking it out for sure. I never thought about a 'live-like' environment...
 
Well, typically a live like environment is live like - that means same kit etc, stuff to emulate WAN behaviour. Otherwise you can't do proper production and performance testing. You get getting to a better position with what you are doing. If you are doing it for your boss its worth pointing out what testing you can do with your virtual lab (so like you said GPO testing, patch updates 99% etc) and what you can't test (performance testing is out of scope, small disk that a hardware driver could cause issues with a patch that of course you are not emulating on a virtual platform).
 
Rez'ing my thread since it's still 'up-to-date'

I've done a lot more reading on virtualization and VMware but still haven't wrapped my head around what exactly I need and it's starting to actually look more expensive than I originally thought.

My biggest question is on memory overcommit on VMware vSphere Hypervisor (formerly VMware free ESXi). Can I overcommit memory to virtual machines? I'm looking at getting a box with ~12gb of RAM but running a handful of operating systems. I don't want to be limited to 6 machines at 2gb each, or 3 machines at 4gb.
 
wavewerx said:
Rez'ing my thread since it's still 'up-to-date'

I've done a lot more reading on virtualization and VMware but still haven't wrapped my head around what exactly I need and it's starting to actually look more expensive than I originally thought.

My biggest question is on memory overcommit on VMware vSphere Hypervisor (formerly VMware free ESXi). Can I overcommit memory to virtual machines? I'm looking at getting a box with ~12gb of RAM but running a handful of operating systems. I don't want to be limited to 6 machines at 2gb each, or 3 machines at 4gb.
Click to expand...

Yes, absolutely, by a significant amount. Keep an eye on swap rates though - once you start swapping, things can get very slow :) You generally want 75% actual memory utilization for HA, but most machines won't use 100% of what they're allocated.
 
lopoetve said:
Yes, absolutely, by a significant amount. Keep an eye on swap rates though - once you start swapping, things can get very slow :) You generally want 75% actual memory utilization for HA, but most machines won't use 100% of what they're allocated.
Click to expand...

Thanks Iopoetve. My Dell rep informed me that memory overcommit is only in the Standard (paid) version and up...? Is she mis-informed?

I don't need super high availability. For the first long while this will be a machine I only have access to and again, just a test bed. Perhaps in the future it will get different duties...
 
I honestly don't know on the licensing - I don't look at that all that often. I'll see what I can find. :)
 
wavewerx said:
Thanks Iopoetve. My Dell rep informed me that memory overcommit is only in the Standard (paid) version and up...? Is she mis-informed?

I don't need super high availability. For the first long while this will be a machine I only have access to and again, just a test bed. Perhaps in the future it will get different duties...
Click to expand...

This is a myth. They all do memory overcommit. Stop buying from Dell. ;)
 
NetJunkie said:
This is a myth. They all do memory overcommit. Stop buying from Dell. ;)
Click to expand...

Thanks NetJunkie! What's an alternative to Dell? For a small / medium sized business I thought Dell or HP were the de facto standards? There's also the option of building this box myself... but that would move all the support onto me as well...
 
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