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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.