Virtualization in China: GE Healthcare Group's VMware Deployment experience

What kind of situation and background, the need for application server virtualization, and in the end how to implement virtualization, virtualization can bring to the enterprise what? With these questions, the reporter contacted GE Medical Group, which has deployed virtualization applications, and shared their experience in virtualized deployment applications.

According to the GE Medical Group Asia Pacific Server Operations Manager Ma, GE Medical Group has a total of more than 300 servers in the Asia-Pacific region, including more than 10 physical servers running virtual machines, running more than 40 virtual machines.

Virtualization solves data Center resource configuration and space challenges

So, what was the reason for GE to start deploying virtualization in the data center? For GE Healthcare, Ma said, the main reason for deployment virtualization is the desire to achieve fast infrastructure services and flexible provisioning through virtualization.

The GE Medical Group's order system will have a high peak at the end of each quarter. In order to cope with this peak, the server had to set aside a lot of computing power, and these computational capacity in peacetime is a great waste. In addition, as a service support department, Ma they need to meet the system requirements of other departments. The European division requires GE Medical Group Asia to provide technical support to provide 7 servers to install the relevant ERP applications. But Ma says it doesn't want to buy additional new servers for them, but instead wants to provide virtual machine services through virtualization technology.

"After careful testing and evaluation, they finally approved of such a scheme." "Although our data center space is not tight and there is enough money to buy servers, we need virtualization to achieve better manageability and flexible provisioning," Ma said. Of course, you can reduce the amount of hardware you need and increase the utilization of your server resources. ”

Deploy reliable virtualization scenarios with SAN architectures

As the virtual machine running is the production system of the Enterprise, GE chooses a more reliable San way to deploy VMware's virtualization solution. GE Healthcare has built three HP DL585 into a single server Farm, then connected SAN storage systems on the back end, storing all more than 10 virtual machines on the San, including Dhcp/dns, print servers, and order systems, Veritas Backup systems.

Through the Virtual Center management system, GE Medical Group can migrate virtual machines freely between these three DL585 to achieve the need of provisioning. At ordinary times, the three servers in a balanced operation of each virtual machine; At the end of each quarter, virtual Center is used to migrate other VMs to both servers, while retaining the order system to meet peak needs.

Virtualization brings flexibility and manageability

The fact that the deployment is complete has proven that virtualization can help GE significantly improve server utilization and increase the flexibility of provisioning. According to the introduction, GE's server utilization has been upgraded from 10% to 60%, and its deployment of a new service has been reduced from the previous months to the current number of hours.

Ma said that in the past, the deployment of new applications, from the application to the arrival of equipment, installation, configuration, take about 3 months, and now use the virtual machine template to open a new server application, only need about 1 hours time.

Be sure to do a rigorous test

Although the effect of virtualization is highly praised, but Ma repeatedly stressed to reporters that must undergo rigorous testing to be able to deploy production systems on top of virtualization.

Before the virtualization scenario was applied, Ma's GE Healthcare Group headquarters had adopted a virtualization solution that required a virtualized environment that was already running well in the United States. But before the Ma of their own virtualized production systems, they were in the United States after a long period of stress testing, backup testing, and the gradual migration of the required applications to the virtualization platform.

Avoidance of blind Virtualization

Not all applications are suitable for virtualization, and not all systems should be integrated. For today's server virtualization, the most telling is to use VMware for x86 system virtualization.

Ma says that for GE Healthcare, most applications are based on the Solaris environment, so there is no need to virtualize with VMware, but to implement virtualization features directly with Solaris's own container.

While virtualization can help consolidate data centers, there is no need to consolidate for consolidation. He says it is not possible to migrate services that are now running well in the data center, or even just deployed, to the virtualization platform because of consolidation.

"The business is all about business, technology just pushes the business." Can't put the cart before the horse, let the business adapt technology. "Ma stressed.

Issues to be aware of virtualization

Because it's a new technology, there are always problems when deploying virtualization, requiring users to respond carefully.

Ma said that when they upgraded VMware's ESX server from version 2.5 to 3.0, both of the three servers were fine, but one had a problem and was resolved through remote technical support from VMware engineers. If it does not, it may cause a virtual machine that has already been deployed to be unavailable.

"The solution to this problem is that when upgrading a server or ESX server, it is best to migrate the virtual machines that are running above to other servers, then migrate back after the upgrade, so that by analogy, complete all server upgrades so that there is no problem." "Ma said.

In addition, some vendors do not support running their applications on virtual machines, such as Symantec's Veritas backup software does not support running on VMware, but VMware can support Veritas operations. Ma says their remote offices need Veritas to implement backups, but they are unwilling to buy a physical machine for backup. After testing, they decided to run Veritas on the virtual machine.

"There is a real risk that if there is a problem, veritase may not be willing to take responsibility, but given the high cost of redeploying a physical machine, we are still using a virtual machine to deploy." "At least we do this at the remote office at the moment, but not in the data center, after all, the data center is more security-oriented," Ma said. ”