Dalian: The construction and reflection of data center based on cloud computing

Cloud computing technology is now a panacea, no matter what the solution will eventually be attributed to cloud computing. In the wave of cloud computing, should university data centers deploy cloud computing? How to make cloud computing real landing, and really play the benefit, not only a concept, but also a question worth pondering.

The practice of virtualization technology in data center

Since 2003, Dalian University of Technology has set up a centralized data center for the unified management of the servers for external information release from various departments in the school. The construction of the data center has gone through two stages: the first phase uses the independent 1U physical server to provide the service, the most has more than 200 physical servers. In this mode, the application of backup management, physical server fault handling, room area, power supply, refrigeration consumption and other issues are concentrated. Starting from 2006, the school began to test the server virtualization technology, and in 2007 years built the university's first large-scale VMware virtualization server farm, starting from the second phase, the original physical server application on the gradual migration to the virtualized server, now more than 280 virtual machines are running. Further expansion of the virtualized server cluster in 2009, the first virtualization servers were upgraded with memory and gigabit network adapters in 2010, and the data center switch, Cisco Nexus 7018, was deployed. At present, the data center has deployed 16 CPU virtualization server clusters, all physical servers with dual 10GbE network adapters, dual 4Gb FC HBA Allied, the physical server cluster has maintained a reasonable load.

In the process of server virtualization implementation, found that the physical server memory consumption rate is much higher than the CPU consumption speed, so in the server cluster expansion, the new server memory increased to 144GB, the original server memory also expanded to 64GB. Another important factor that affects the efficiency of server virtualization is the performance of the storage system. To further improve storage system performance, in 2011, we carried out a Fastcache technology upgrade to the existing storage system EMC cx4-960, using a multiple 100GB solid-state disk to cache the entire system, which made the storage read-write latency significantly improved.

Figure 1 Datacenter Virtualization server cluster topology

In the aspect of virtualization platform security, strict authority management and backup system are designed. For example, resource management has only the right to allocate virtual machines and configure designated networks within its own resource pool; backup is done in the background, and resource management cannot delete backups. On a backup system, EMC Avamar provides a unified global weight-reduction backup that can provide any one-week backup of any virtual machine in half a year. For critical servers, use VMware Data recovery for daily backups, and tape libraries for critical applications for application-level backups. Through strict management measures and multilevel automatic backup mechanism, the security of data center is ensured effectively.

Coordinate with internal organization to plan reasonable management structure, integrate the broad infrastructure (including network, storage, virtualization platform, backup, computer room environment, etc.) into one department management, and other departments become users of the department. Practice has proved that this model can effectively improve the utilization rate of resources, improve the efficiency of management, and initially formed the Department of Internal Infrastructure cloud service delivery.

In the process of implementation of the virtualization platform, the operation and management cost of the data center is greatly reduced, and the physical server of the data center has been reduced by nearly half from 200 units. The management department carries on the application promotion, the migration cost drops significantly. Through templates, snapshots and other mechanisms, management can easily deploy applications, when the application upgrade failure can be a complete fallback.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)