Virtualization atMassac Memorial Hospital

Using VMware

Past Situation

• Many Servers of many ages• Varying levels of utilized disk space

– Low excess space– Underutilized space

• Maintenance Agreements• No Failover

Why did MMH Virtualize?

• As part of the Hospital’s master plan, both facility and network upgrades were focused on.

• Leverage centralized server power and clear aging physical servers from the server room.

• Provide server resources for new applications

Consultation

• MMH called the IT consulting group of RSM McGladrey in Cedar Rapids, IA.– RSM McGladrey performed a complete

system analysis.– Fit MMH’s budget.

• “Biggest bang for the buck”

– Virtualize, bring e-mail in house, and rewire the network.

What is VMware?

• The name "VMware" comes from the acronym "VM", meaning "virtual machine", while ware comes from second part of "software".

• VMware's desktop software runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. VMware's enterprise software, VMware ESX Server, runs directly on server hardware without requiring an additional underlying operating system. This is known as being platform- or hardware- agnostic.

What does VMware do?

• VMware software provides a completely virtualized set of hardware to the guest operating system.

• VMware software virtualizes the hardware for a video adapter, a network adapter, and hard disk adapters. The host provides pass-through drivers for guest USB, serial, and parallel devices.

What does VMware do?

• In this way, VMware virtual machines become highly portable between computers, because every host looks nearly identical to the guest.

• In practice, a systems administrator can pause operations on a virtual machine guest, move or copy that guest to another physical computer, and there resume execution exactly at the point of suspension.

• Alternately, for enterprise servers, a feature called VMotion allows the migration of operational guest virtual machines between similar but separate hardware hosts sharing the same storage.

How does VMware work?• VMware Workstation, Server, and ESX take a

more optimized path to running target operating systems on the host than emulators which simulate the function of each CPU instruction on the target machine one-by-one

• VMware software does not emulate an instruction set for different hardware not physically present. This significantly boosts performance, but can cause problems when moving virtual machine guests between hardware hosts using different instruction-sets– 64-bit Intel and AMD CPUs), or between hardware hosts

with a differing number of CPUs.– Stopping the virtual-machine guest before moving it to a

different CPU type generally causes no issues.

Virtualization Hardware

• What hardware did it take for Massac Memorial Hardware to begin Virtualization?– Two Physical Servers– EMC Celerra/CLARiiON– Gigabit Switch

Two Physical Servers

• HP ProLiant DL385 G2– 4 CPU x 2.6 GHz– Dual Core AMD Opteron ™ Processors– 5 NIC’s– 8 GB RAM

HP DL385 Servers

EMC Celerra

• Celerra NS350– Entry-level midrange IP storage platform

that scales up to 6 TB, and simultaneously supports FC and ATA disks.

EMC CLARiiON

• CLARiiON CX300– SAN disk array manufactured and sold

by EMC Corporation.

Cisco Switch

• CATALYST 3750 24 PT 10/100/1000 POE

Virtualization Software

• What software did Massac Memorial Hardware choose when beginning to Virtualize?– PlateSpin Power Convert– Windows Server 2003 Licenses– Windows XP Pro Licenses

PlateSpin

• PlateSpin focuses on tools to help manage virtualization, using either VMware or Microsoft Virtual Server software. PlateSpin PowerConvert allows system administrators to migrate workloads between physical servers in order to match workload to the machine best suited for the job.

Massac Memorial Virtualization

• Four Virtual Servers– Windows Server 2003

• One Virtual Workstation– Windows XP Pro

• Load balanced between two ESX servers.– Failover enabled

Windows 2003 Virtual Servers

• SRV01MMH– Backup Domain Controller

• SRV02MMH– Exchange Server 2007

• SRV03EDGE– Email Filtering

• SRV04KRONOS– Time Clock Server

Windows XP Pro Virtualization

• WKS0001– A Windows XP Pro virtual client is

installed, but we are not using it at this time.• Saving for a future application that will run

on XP and not require a full server 2003 license. Cost savings $

The Future

• Eventually virtualize Healthland Application Server– Currently Windows 2000 Server– Does have serial modem for fax server

• Healthland Monitoring PC– Windows XP Pro– No legacy hardware

The Future

• Virtualize Terminal Server– Currently Windows Server 2000

• Virtualize PACS Server– Windows Server 2003

• Virtualize PACS Gateway– Windows XP Pro

Challenges

• Vendor Resistance– Saw some resistance from Healthland

(Dairyland) during 2006 planning and 2007 install

– They are starting to embrace the technology, but are not completely ready for their clients to go virtual

Virtualization Walkthrough

• Virtualization Infrastructure Client– Our VMware server is running a Physical

Server, and we log in with credentials for domain Administrator.

Virtual Infrastructure Client

Virtual Infrastructure Client

• Inventory– Hosts– Clusters

• ESX Physical Servers

– Resource Pools

Virtual Infrastructure Client

• Hosts

Virtual Infrastructure Client

• Clusters– ESX Servers

Virtual Infrastructure Client

• Resource Pools

Virtual Infrastructure Client

• Resource Pools– Right Click on a Resource Pool for more

options.

Virtual Infrastructure Client

• Resource Pools– Tabs contain more Resource Pool

specific options

Console

Console

Edit Settings

iSCSI

• Internet SCSI protocol– Clients (initiators) send SCSI commands

to SCSI storage devices (targets) on remote servers.

– Popular Storage Area Network (SAN) protocol

– Illusion of locally-attached disks.– Can be run over long distances using

existing network infrastructure.

iSCSI Target

• Celerra– iSCSI Target

• All servers target one network portal, our Celerra

– ISCSI LUN• Named according to server requiring the

disk space• Allocate the disk space

iSCSI Initiator

• Microsoft iSCSI Initiator installed on server requiring disk space from SAN

• 172.17.1.### IP Scheme– IP is given to EMC Target– IP is given to server client

requiring disk space– All iSCSI clients/targets attached to

Cisco Gigabit switch on VLAN.

iSCSI Qualified Names

• EMC Celerra

• Windows 2000 Server

iSCSI Initiator

• Our Windows 2000 server sees the allocated disk space on SAN as a local storage disk.

• Currently using iSCSI for Healthland scanned images and PACS images

Thanks for your time

Nick SainatoNetwork SpecialistMassac Memorial Hospital28 Chick StreetMetropolis, IL 62960nicks@massachealth.org618-524-2176 ext. 281Fax 618-524-4131