What would you do

[DeChache]

The group I work for has an intuitive to virtualize everything we can on the new VMware cluster we spent booku bucks for.

All the information I can gleen on the cluster is

There are 80 cores available (But I think this is pure PR BS because as far as I know you can only use the cores available on a particular node)

I have no idea what there is for ram in each server I seem to remember something about 48 gig per node

Disk is an ISCSI back end I think its a full 12 drive Raid 01 15k sas for VHD and a large san for bulk storage.


I am planning on moving most of my systems over to the cluster most of my systems are low system usage app server for web app servers and such. But I have 2 system that are used for trans-coding the videos for the streaming servers.

The way our app works is that the video is recorded in a raw form on on their own system and then it is uploaded to my trans-coding data server. This server is a dual quad core system (8 cores total) with 32 gigs of ram. This particular system runs all 8 cores at full load during business hours. Load tends to go down at night. I should also mention that this box is running an MSSQL 2008 database for the web front end. They THINK they will be ready to support MSSQL sometime in the next year. To help reduce some load from the VM

I am told since there are 80 cores on the Virtual Cluster that is SHOULD work just fine. I have a stand alone testbed ESXi server that is a sister server to the on listed above (8 Core (2.66Ghz Harpertown Xeons 32G Ram) I know it doesnt take that much of a cpu load to start to slow down that server. The server encoder 4 videos at once each with multiple threads. (I'm not particularly found of the software but the end users love it so I'm happy)

I think that the nodes in the big VM cluster are compatible to my servers.

I know we have people here that work with Vmware all day and I am just looking for opinions on how my systems will run in this environment. In the next couple months I need to implement another similar trans-coding server for another piece of software.


Vmware GURUs of [H]ard what is your opinion of my situation. I'm thinking that if they load is kept reasonable on the cluster things should be ok. But my experience with ESXi is limited to single instance servers.

If there are any further questions please let me know. I will answer them to the best of my abilities.

Thanks for reading and look forward to your responses.

 

[Child of Wonder]

A VM is limited to 8 total vCPUs unless the host it resides on has less physical cores. So it depends on how many cores your hosts have. I would assume they have at least 8 cores. If this VM really needs 8 cores, I wouldn't virtualize it unless your hosts have at least 12 cores, otherwise there won't be any CPU resources available for other VMs on the same host.

If you do virtualize it, make sure to enable automated DRS so VMs can be dynamically VMotioned between hosts during times of high load.

You should also measure how many IOPS these servers require and how many your SANs can provide. Will these servers choke out IO access to other VMs? What about IO bandwidth? Will it gobble up all the bandwidth on a single host? Maybe you need a dedicated pair of NICs on their own vSwitch with a port group just for these VMs.

Not knowing much about your environment it's tough to give any good advice.

 

[DeChache]

A VM is limited to 8 total vCPUs unless the host it resides on has less physical cores. So it depends on how many cores your hosts have. I would assume they have at least 8 cores. If this VM really needs 8 cores, I wouldn't virtualize it unless your hosts have at least 12 cores, otherwise there won't be any CPU resources available for other VMs on the same host.

If you do virtualize it, make sure to enable automated DRS so VMs can be dynamically VMotioned between hosts during times of high load.

You should also measure how many IOPS these servers require and how many your SANs can provide. Will these servers choke out IO access to other VMs? What about IO bandwidth? Will it gobble up all the bandwidth on a single host? Maybe you need a dedicated pair of NICs on their own vSwitch with a port group just for these VMs.

Not knowing much about your environment it's tough to give any good advice.

My system will encode up to 4 Videos at a time and use as many threads as it can. It sees the same load whether the is one video in the queue or 50. My colleagues in other places are using bigger boxes than I am and still see the same kinda of load.

Sorry I don't know much about the environment they don't seem to want to tell us much. I can answer questions about my systems and that is about all.

I know the ISCSI backplane is Gig-E on cluster. I think the san is a EMC Clarion?? with 15K disks

What is a good way to measure my IOPs on the physical server I have it running on internal disks 3 TB raid 5

 

[Child of Wonder]

My system will encode up to 4 Videos at a time and use as many threads as it can. It sees the same load whether the is one video in the queue or 50. My colleagues in other places are using bigger boxes than I am and still see the same kinda of load.

Sorry I don't know much about the environment they don't seem to want to tell us much. I can answer questions about my systems and that is about all.

I know the ISCSI backplane is Gig-E on cluster. I think the san is a EMC Clarion?? with 15K disks

What is a good way to measure my IOPs on the physical server I have it running on internal disks 3 TB raid 5

What do you monitor your servers with? If you have a monitoring suite in place it probably has something that can tell you.

If not. just use Perfmon during the server's peak usage. Add a counter under Physical Disk and select the volume your data is on. Track the average disk reads and disk writes per second. Add the two values together at a given time and that's the IOPS for that moment. Try to establish a baseline for that server -- average IOPS and peak IOPS.

 

[RiDDLeRThC]

I would really question if an encoding server is a good fit for virtualization.

 

[DeChache]

I would really question if an encoding server is a good fit for virtualization.

Hey you and me both but I don't get a say in the matter. I have a CIO that only listens to the group that he directly supervises and 2 guys in that group beating their chest saying their cluster can do anything.

I sounds like I have to cluster my encoders across 4 nodes and in doing that I have to break out the app server and the Database. Also my application is licensed by hardware ID so no vmotion no DRS so I having trouble seeing the benefit of all this. This is going to be great. So heres hoping my app supports this because if not I guess I need to break out my programing cap and get going.


Wish me luck

 

[Child of Wonder]

Hey you and me both but I don't get a say in the matter. I have a CIO that only listens to the group that he directly supervises and 2 guys in that group beating their chest saying their cluster can do anything.

I sounds like I have to cluster my encoders across 4 nodes and in doing that I have to break out the app server and the Database. Also my application is licensed by hardware ID so no vmotion. This is going to be great. So heres hoping my app supports this because if not I guess I need to break out my programing cap and get going.


Wish me luck

Or look for a new app.

Some vendors actively try to go against the grain with virtualization. In my case, I look to replace the vendor whenever possible if they won't play ball with virtualization.

 

[DeChache]

Or look for a new app.

Some vendors actively try to go against the grain with virtualization. In my case, I look to replace the vendor whenever possible if they won't play ball with virtualization.

No choice in the matter. App is bought and paid for for the next five years. Not to mention the users and the admin staff love it. It is a good app just takes a lot of work on the back end. I don't get to make decisions I just have to make it work. I don't think its so much they don't want to play ball. They are sending me their how to of how to break the server into its parts its just that the encoding part uses so much CPU power its just impractical.

 

[Child of Wonder]

No choice in the matter. App is bought and paid for for the next five years. Not to mention the users and the admin staff love it. It is a good app just takes a lot of work on the back end. I don't get to make decisions I just have to make it work. I don't think its so much they don't want to play ball. They are sending me their how to of how to break the server into its parts its just that the encoding part uses so much CPU power its just impractical.

Just make sure you manage your resources and capacity plan appropriately. Like I said, automated DRS will be your friend. Keep a close eye on the CPU Ready time on your VMs to see if they're having to wait a long time for access to the host's physical cores. Depending on your SLAs, try to keep it below 300ms average and 500ms peak.

Breaking up the server is a good idea as it can be more evenly divided among hosts. However, it also increases complexity and overhead.

I've been in your shoes when management forces an application down my throat and, despite misgivings, have to do things their way.

Good luck!

 

[DeChache]

Just make sure you manage your resources and capacity plan appropriately. Like I said, automated DRS will be your friend. Keep a close eye on the CPU Ready time on your VMs to see if they're having to wait a long time for access to the host's physical cores. Depending on your SLAs, try to keep it below 300ms average and 500ms peak.

Breaking up the server is a good idea as it can be more evenly divided among hosts. However, it also increases complexity and overhead.

I've been in your shoes when management forces an application down my throat and, despite misgivings, have to do things their way.

Good luck!

It looks like breaking up my app can be done rather seamlessly but I don't think DRS is going to work because of the way the app is licensed. My other apps that are licensed this way can not use Vmotion.


It uses an hardware identifier to double check the key.

I'm not looking forward managing this mess. There are to many things to go wrong when my single bulky server is handling this just fine. I love Virtualization and I am all for it. Like I said I was already planning to move all of my apps sans my two encoders.