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We at the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust have started a Virtualization project and for those who are thinking about going this route or have already done it, I simply wanted to come with my input and share our concept.
We have had testing done on an older system which allowed us to run 5 VMs to the test proof of concept and saw tremendous potential in virtualizing our systems.
Since we are moving ALL of the Tessitura systems out to a co-location facility where we are renting a Full rack we decided to take our web servers, database servers for the web(not tessitura) and all the DC’s and helpdesk systems and build them all on VM boxes. We are now in the process of consolidating up to 20 systems onto 2 ESXI servers using 2 Quad Core Procs on Dell 2950s attached to a DELL equal logic ISCSI SAN, which performed beautifully and we were able to have up 2000 tickets sold in 15 minutes using the TEST HARNESS without the WEB-API(as VM) or SEAT(as VM) server crashing or causing errors and none of our other systems on the ESXI servers noticed any performance decrease.
As a rule of thumb when it comes to VMwares ESX/ESXI servers you can have 2-3 VMs pr CPU core and assign 1-2gb of memory pr machine you want to have running on the ESXI server. It IS recommended to have VMs running on a SAN device if you go higher than 3-4 VMs on a ESXI server, as IO utilization on a local SAS/SATA disk becomes excessive and might cause data corruption(learned from own experience)
We highly recommend going dell Equallogic ISCSI SAN or using similar technology for the Ease of use, friendly GUI, performance and mostly PRICE… it’s half the price of NETapp, 3Par and a 3rd of the price of EMC devices with similar performance. Setup on Dell Equallogic ISCSI san is done and completed in 2-4 hours and you can start deploying VMs and setting up a clustered environment in 5 hours.
As a side note, Vmware have multiple Vmware Appliances that assist with centralizing monitoring and performance tuning so you can ensure you have the right hardware for the right job and the ESXI servers can easily can be added to Vmware Virtual Center after-the-fact to allow Vmotion and the other bells and whistles Vmware comes with.
You're using virtualization on your databases? How's that working for you?
We are not virtualizing our databases for tessitura, only for our web server. Our tessitura database is housed on a SQL cluster and will be moved to 2 dell r900 servers with an equallogic ISCSI backend san storage. For our web servers, we have not seen any type of degradation of performance and have in fact seen a boost of performance since we have/had the web database server residing on local hard drives on 4 year old systems.
We do have caching enabled on our web servers, so all immediate traffic is pulling from it and every 15 minutes or so the cache gets updated from the database, this is something we enabled after our webserver database was pummeled seriously during a large on-sale.
We're using VMware virtualization for our whole Tessitura implementation. No problems.
Hi Douglas
That is an interesting report you have posted.
We are also using a very similar virtual setup for our whole Tessitura system, using dell hardware. We have not gone live yet but I am more than happy with the way it is all working to date.
I looks live we are going to go down the same virtual route with a project that has just stared to replace other servers on our network.
Regards Ewan.
I guess its how heavly your instance of Tessitura gets hit. If you have on Sale days for members and have thousands of hits over a few hours, you would want a real database server to cope, as you can do more things with real disks instead of virtual disk, i.e. move the database to one set of disks, the Logs to another and the TempDB to a different set again, setting the memory up correctly and various other settings within SQL (which I forget now).
If you just have a steady stream of booking, then there is no problem going down the ESXi route as any IO bottlenecks won't show as a problem.
One way of testing, is use the Tessitura Web load testing tool and crank the settings right past what is recommended in the documentation until you notice performance issues.
Our application (API/Seat etc...) setup is very similar to Dougs, except our DB disks are local to the server, not over fibre/copper to the SAN. The reason behind this is for speed and ease of change on a failed disk.