vCenter Server in AWS? Bad idea to me

Z

Zetro

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 2, 2005
Messages
296
Hey everyone,

Tomorrow I have a meeting with our design group and as the Senior infrastructure admin I have been asked to review putting our local vCenter instance into AWS. I for a host of reasons am totally against this but want input to if I am just being close minded or if my fears are true.

Our environment consists of around 40 high density hosts split between 3 sites in Alberta, 1 site in British Columbia, and 4 sites in Massachusetts. Our head office is in Alberta and is where around half of our VMware infrastructure lives as well as our vCenter Server which exists outside of a cluster. Our connections to all of these other sites are though MPLS links varying in speed between 100Mbps and 5Gbps.

Our Amazon infrastructure is terminated by VPN (no MPLS) to our head office and British Columbia site and we route with the head office being the higher priority. Oregon is our most used area of AWS and where it would be located.

My worries are the following:

1) The cost of putting vCenter and its DB in AWS would be high - very high. vCenter would need a xLarge M3 instance as our environment currently with no DB uses around 8-9GB of ram. Further more we would require either an RDS instance (not sure if VMware supports that) or run the SQL locally which would possibly require an even larger instance possibly. At $0.28 an hour that would be around $200 a month to operate at M3.xlarge with Server 2012 (no DB)

2) With it being an internet based VPN that we get around 25Mbps of throughput on from our head office with the latency getting much higher for sites in Massachusetts going to the head office then to AWS/Oregon I really don't see it being overly efficient

3) Many of our VPN sites (i.e. Northern Alberta and Massachusetts) have routing issues getting to AWS as we don't populate it into that portion of the network. Basically a host in MA doesn't know how to get to AWS

4) In the event of an internet outage or fiber cut (our BC MPLS link and primary internet connection share the same outgoing fiber - it gets cut a lot) we would lose access to our backup site to AWS and our connection to vCenter. This makes managing the 500 or so virtual machines in our infrastructure difficult.

I am really struggling as to why this option would be considered a good idea. We have a ton of AWS instances and it is extremely useful in many respects. Basically by moving it to AWS with no real good redundancy I feel we are losing a lot more than we are gaining.

Thoughts?
 
More in the event of a major outage everything networking wise flows though our head office in a star based network design where AWS is just a spoke off of it. Basically anything that makes our internal network stop flowing would also kill our access to AWS.

I just don't know why we would move a management tool for local infrastructure to the cloud. I can't find any examples of people doing it.
 
I can see no good from this. None. Maybe someone with experience actually do this might have some insight on why it may be a good idea, but even then i can't think of a reason to. We have a large vmware and AWS presence and I dont think the possibility of this has remotely crossed our mind, and if anyone brought it up we would just laugh them out of the building. We have had enough vcenter outages over the years to know it needs to be on a physical box, one of our very few still left, to be able to withstand all kinds of SAN/Network/etc outages. As long as vcenter and its DB are accessible I am confident of our recoverability. God forbid a link to AWS going down, or an AZ or region type outage and not being able to manage anything because of that idiotic design decision to keep it in the AWS.
 
Thank you for making me not feel insane

I am just so incensed about having to defend this tomorrow (that having it on a physical box is a good idea) that I may struggle to be composed.

We have a major AWS lover in our organization and he believes that everything should be in the cloud.
 
Totally agreed, sounds better to bang your head against the wall for a week than doing that.

Just wondering, VPN, for that kinda data flow..? - Didnt aws recently launch an interconnect service? aka, get a dc x-conn and hook into aws infrastructure directly into your mpls for better throughput?

Edit: http://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/
 
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They totally have but we don't have any connections to any of their providers

We are a fiber backbone company lol
 
It also depends on your hardware refresh cycle. If a business keeps machines 5-7 years, Amazon starts to look even MORE expensive.
 
If you have 40 hosts in three sites, why are you not just running vCenter as a VM in one of those sites? Depending on the distance between sites, you really should have more than one vCenter. Unless there is a specific reason to use vCenter on a Windows server, I would also recommend using the vCenter Server Appliance. I manage about 10 different vCenter Servers through the US and all of them are VMs running onsite where the hosts are located. I've been converting most of them to vCenter Server Appliances so I don't have to worry about SQL licensing and also so I don't have to deal with Windows since I am the primary Microsoft engineer at our company.
 
vCenter isn't that critical. Just replicate to one of your sites and keep the replicated VM offline. All distributed services will continue to run even if the vCenter VM fails/dies. You can bring the offline vCenter replica online, just make sure you don't lock yourself out of the host that contains the offline replica.

Also, +1 for the vCenter Appliance.

Putting vCenter on AWS makes no sense to me.
 
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