DataCenter

Virtualizing the Ad Agency

Virtualization seems to have taken the IT world by storm, and those of us in the Advertising business are along for the ride. I’ve been playing around with virtualization myself for over a year now, and I only see this becoming a bigger part of our business in the future.

It starts at the desktop level, where personally I’ve been running VMware’s Workstation product on my personal laptop. I’ve been running Vista for over a year now, and during that time Workstation has provided me with a convenient copy of XP for those apps which didn’t behave on Vista. The reason I ultimately chose VMware’s product over Microsoft’s desktop virtualization was that it included support for USB devices.

Even more important for those of us in the Agency business at a desktop level, are the possibilities for desktop virtualization the Mac side. Once again, we’ve opted to go with VMware’s Fusion product on our Intel-based Macs. We’re currently struggling with two problems on our Macs which have proven difficult to solve. We’re not huge fans of Microsoft Entourage as an e-mail client, and I could probably devote an entire rant to Microsoft’s decision to drop support for Outlook on the Mac side. We’re also experiencing problems with Mac access to our SharePoint sites. SharePoint works with Safari and Firefox, but as one would expect with a Microsoft app, it works much better with Internet Explorer. We’re hoping that both problems will be solved by actually providing our Mac users with access to Outlook and IE through VMware’s Fusion and a local copy of Windows on their machines.

On the server side, we took the plunge into VMware last year, purchasing ESX Server. We’ve gone fairly slowly in terms of virtualizing our infrastructure, but we’re currently running a SharePoint server, two utility servers, and two development servers as VMs, and we’ve become totally sold on the technology. As a result, we’ve added a second box in order to utilize Virtual Center to aid in the management and to provide load balancing. We’ve also added shared storage via our EqualLogic iSCSI SAN. It all works great, and the possibilities it provides us are endless. If there is a downside, this stuff is expensive, and VMware’s product line and licensing are pretty confusing, and that could give them a problem down the road as Microsoft’s Hyper-V product continues to mature.

We’ve got big plans for virtualization in our Agency. In addition to what we’re doing already, we’re considering virtualization for both high availability and disaster recovery. While we’ve been warned not to virtualize some things, such as domain controllers, Exchange server, and SQL server, we do feel that we can employ a virtual copy in a high-availability or disaster scenario, especially in cases where we maintain the data on a separate platform. We’re also going to explore the possibility of creating a “remote office in a box”, providing us with a quick solution which we could use in acquisitions or the opening of new offices. Our remote offices require a fairly basic setup, and it’s one which we think could be completely virtualized.

We’re going to continue on the path to virtualizing both our servers and desktops. We’ll also be taking a long look at Microsoft’s Hyper-V product. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Our EqualLogic Experience So Far

We’re currently in the process of configuring our very first EqualLogic storage unit. It’s a model from their PS Series, and it gives us a total of 6.5 terabytes of storage in a RAID 50 configuration. We’ve only had it live for about a week now, but we love what we’ve seen so far.

The ease of setup and configuration are light years ahead of what we had on our old fiber channel SAN. While our old SAN provided plenty of storage, configuration and management always seemed to involve a call to our vendor, and even then things never seemed to go smoothly. Based on a few days with the EqualLogic unit, I’m reasonably certain that the calls to the vendor for hand-holding are going to be few and far between.

Besides the ease of use, some of the things we love include the ability to utilize what EqualLogic calls thin provisioning. This enables us to create a 500 GB volume while only using 50 GB of actual drive space. The host OS sees a 500 GB volume, but we’re only using 50 GB on the SAN. As the space begins to fill up, the space used on the SAN also begins to approach the 500 GB allocation, but it gives you a way to actually allocate more space than you have initially. Obviously, this is a feature that you want to be careful with, because overuse could result in the SAN actually filling up on you if several of these thin provisioned volumes filled up at the same time. The unit provides plenty of warnings to alert you as these volumes approach a level of your choosing.

The snapshot feature is another feature which we are learning to love. When you provision a new volume, you can simply choose to save snapshots of the volume at whatever interval you choose. Want a daily snapshot for backup purposes? No problem. Want to snapshot a volume prior to an update? No problem. The snapshots are differential copies, so they take up very little space. Any one of these snapshots can be mounted as a physical volume used to quickly restore individual files or an entire volume if necessary. Here’s a real life example- currently we have a thin provisioned volume which is taking up 96 GB of actual disk space (the host OS sees it as a 500 GB volume), and we have taken 10 daily differential snapshots of this volume which are currently utilizing 1.36 GB of space.

Obviously, the unit also provides all kinds of built-in redundancy, with dual controllers, power supplies, fans, and 14 total disks. Short of lengthy power outages or losing the entire server room, not much is going to take this product down. We’re just scratching the surface of what the box will do, and we have plans to do a lot more with it. In the coming months we’ll migrate our VMWare and Exchange storage to this unit, and we also plan on utilizing the snapshots and replication features into our evolving disaster recovery strategy.