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Virtualizing servers; security and other implications?

E

Elledan

[H]ard|DCer of the Month - April 2010
Joined
Oct 18, 2001
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In short, for my company I would like to condense and extent the current setup of a single file/MySQL/FTP/other server (daily backups but no redundancy) into a virtualized setup with SSL-forwarding for the services and two physical servers providing fail-over support.

My questions are as follows:

- Would a virtualized environment offer the same kind of security with regard to the SSL service as having it on a separate physical system?
- Are multiple physical systems required for proper redundancy/fail-over support?
- What about data-replication?
- Any other things I may have overlooked?

Thanks in advance :)
 
1) SSL encrypted traffic is SSL encrypted traffic...doesn't matter if it's physical or virtual
2) yes, but it's fail over, not fall over...fall over is bad...server go boom
3) data replication would be best done offsite, and could be facilitated by one of the VMs. you'd need a WAN link capable of decent amounts of IP transport, and a machine at another facility to receive and store that data. I would recommend that you look into ESX with SRM, and getting some floor space at a DR facility, and throwing another server + disk +tape in there, and run production>wan>dr>disk>tape. You could also look into getting ftp upload service from a company that handles the tape backups, and rotates the media offsire for you. If you want a solution you can easily manage, I would look into a Compellant SAN

4) Look into Compellant SAN which would do policy driven data migration, and DR replication natively. Optionally, you could use ESX and SRM to have a collocated facility with another server + san+ tape using something like Commvault Simpana 8 to manage all of your backups, do de-dupe, indexing, etc. It sort of depends on your budget, really. THe cheap route is paying a company for FTP upload, and having them manage the tape systems, and media rotations...but your potential for downtime is increased, as the company may not be local. The less down time you can afford, the more exponentially expensive the solution becomes. The amount of data we're talking about also plays a huge part.
 
Thank you for your reply :)

Our budget for this reorganization is near-zero, and the plan is to do it with existing equipment. We got two sites which takes care of the off-site backup part. The daily incremental backup is at most a few hundred MBs in size, but is expected to grow to GBs a day with a year or two. We are using off-line HDD backups plus data-replication among multiple machines. Downtime of more than an hour/week would become annoying, so there is no need for 99.99999% uptime or so.

What is the setup you'd recommend in terms of VM-solution and configuration, specifically the fail-over part?
 
2x ESX enterprise server licenses, 1 copy of vcserver. enable HA and DRS. look into SRM, and utilize VCB (hopefully in conjunction with your current backup software).

5 9's uptime is 99.999% uptime for the year, or about 2.3hours of downtime per year
6 9's is 99.9999% uptime for the year, or about 0.5 hours of downtime per year

you're asking for 7 9's, which is less than 5 minutes of downtime per year...good luck with that
 
Elledan, I think you would be surprised with what you could pull off with your existing hardware. VMWare is very resource efficient and you could probably condense the amount of servers for a single location by 50% or more. In terms of a SAN if you had a little bit of money my boss found 1TB for under $15,000cdn using SAS drives. Failure rate is higher than SCSI but it would last you until you had a budget to get something a bit more robust.
 
Thank you, sabregen. You missed the 'not' in 'needing 99.99999% uptime', though ;)

Now let me look up what all those abbreviations mean...

We're still using a mixture of IDE and SATA drives for now. As the company grows we'll invest in more dedicated backup equipment and such. For now we're limited to data-replication across servers & sites, plus RAID-1. I'll investigate the options for now and see what we can do with our budget :)
 
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