I remember from last year's conference a number of organizations have had great success in virtualizing Tessitura servers. We are thinking of doing that this year, and am looking for tips and pitfalls.
Specifically, does it make sense to combine the LIVE and TEST web servers on one piece of hardware and separate VMs? Of course that shifts risk to hardware failure, but with our budgets we can never truly retire risks, and instead just have to pick where we place it. Has anyone had good/bad experiences with that? Does the Tessitura Network support that setup?
Also, in terms of the rest of the Tessitura server infrastructure, do any of you have any examples of your virtualized setups that are working really well? Any examples of what not to do? Are there certain apps and/or services for which we should avoid virtualization? Are there apps/services which should not exist on the same hardware, even if they exist in separate VMs?
Thanks for your help!
Britt
Britt,
At BAM, we have been virtualized for 3 to 4 years now. However, we do not run Live and Test on the same hardware. We have two groups of VMware servers one for just production the other for Test and Development.
I don't know your time frame for implementation, however there will be a session at the conference where we will be talking about all things Virtualization and the Cloud.
--Tom
I've not seen any problems that one could specifically correlate with virtualization technology.
We're running 4 ESXi servers with vMotion so if one server fails, the vm's will just move to the next available system. We don't runTest and Live on the same hardware but they both share the same SAN device so that is our bigger risk point of failure. In terms of the actual breakout of services, we have the Tessitura SQL server running on one guest which is dedicated to only that function (not even hosting any of our other SQL databases). All of the ancillary services are running on a second guest. Same setup for the test environment.
I have an additional question to tack on to this thread. For those of you that have virtualized everything onto one piece of hardware are you including the web gateway? We are looking ahead to version 11 and the load increase it will add to the web gateway. Currently we arein the virtualization planning stages and are trying to decide whether the web gateway should be included in our virtualization scheme or kept separate since we don't know how the increased load will affect it and the environment.
-Rich
Rich,
Here at BAM we have the Web API Server as a Virtual Server in our VShpere Virtual Cluster. However our production web servers are hosted off site by a hosting provider.
Has anyone virtualized their Live system using Microsoft Hyper-V? We are considering virtualizing but have been Hyper-V for a while. We could switch to VM for Tess, but would like to keep to Hyper-V.
Thanks,
Aaron GreeneNetwork Operations ManagerOregon Shakespeare Festivalaarong@osfashland.org
We were running Hyper-V along with vmWare for a while and eventually abandoned HV altogether in favor of vmWare. The initial idea was that the mission critical stuff (Tessitura, Exchange) would be on vmWare and 'second-tier' would live in Hyper-V. I found that I just couldn't rely on Hyper-V - especially in terms of disaster and failover. Also, while you get the advantage(?) of possibly leveraging that Windows OS for other purposes (not wise but you could in a pinch) you of course incur a lot of overhead that you don't have to worry about with vmWare.If you have a lot of experience with Hyper-V along with new third-party tools or better integration with Operations / Virtualization Manager to handle DR than there was a couple of years ago when I was playing it you might not have the same concerns and could be totally fine running on Hyper-V. The price is certainly right when it comes to Hyper-V.
Good luck!