Experience new virtualized data center values

"If customers want to experience virtualization solutions for themselves, they can visit Dell's Corporate Solutions center in cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, where we build virtualized environments comprised of the PowerEdge m1000e Blade server and EqualLogic PS5000 series storage products, Enables customers to learn how to design, deploy, and apply Dell's virtualization scenarios through a real experience. "Ms. Hui, general manager of Senior Systems group in Greater China, said in an interview.

Viewing virtualization with a "simplified it" perspective

December 16, 51cto.com/cioage.com reporter Cheng was invited to participate in the Dell Virtualization solutions onsite experience and extensive communication with Dell technical experts.

Not long ago, in Gartner's latest "Ten to three years of IT strategy technology", virtualization ranked first. Concise charts are easy to spread, but many people overlook the comments made by Gartner analysts for virtualization-to become strategic technology, virtualization must also have other features similar to the Swiss Army knife, which cannot be limited to servers. Hui also expressed Dell's view that virtualization is a strategic technology investment that Dell can offer customers complete End-to-end solutions including servers, storage, desktops, and so on. Our goal is to help our customers make use of it in an easy way, and to achieve more innovation. ”

Hui the benefits of applying virtualization technology to three: one is to optimize IT infrastructure and management, the second is to improve business competitiveness, the third is to reduce TCO. The average server CPU usage in the current datacenter is often below 15%, with high power consumption, mediocre performance, and a few weeks of deployment. and a new data center with full application of virtualization technology, server CPU utilization can increase to 60–70%, and reduce energy consumption of more than 30%, increase more than 97% performance, deployment time only need several hours.

The communication reporter learned that Dell's virtualization solutions, as always, adhere to the "simplify it" concept, including out-of-the-box, based on standardized products, to take open cooperation ... To facilitate customers ' understanding of specific virtualization solutions, Dell's services and solutions teams also provide on-site demonstrations that give customers a real sense of the uniqueness of the Dell Virtualization solution: Simple, fast deployment, complete end-to-end solution, continuous data protection, lifecycle management for the entire virtualization platform.

The third generation of virtualization technology contains "values"

During this experience, Dell's product managers and engineers shared their insights into virtualization technologies from different perspectives. Chen Jinkun Chin Khoon, Dell Enterprise Solutions senior Manager in charge of infrastructure consulting, believes that the evolution of virtualization technology is now in its third generation, and that the main reason for users to trust virtualization technology over the next three years will be its high reliability.

Chen Jinkun The characteristics of the third generation virtualization technology into a set of "values", includes server consolidation (dynamic scale-out, "changeable one" mechanism), virtual client and desktop (confidential data protection, standardized centralized management and rapid recovery), business continuity and online (virtual machine migration and virtual host protection), dynamic platform ( Automatically provisioning resources on demand). He argues that Dell's range of solutions appropriately supports these "values", such as virtual machine snapshot protection at the second level, a rto<10-minute disaster recovery in the same city, a fully automated End-to-end virtualization platform, and lifecycle management of the entire virtualization platform.

Chen Jinkun that Dell has a lot of advantages over the same kind of solutions that friends put forward. First of all, Dell itself is the pioneer of virtualization applications, there are many experiences from experience to share with customers. Second, Dell is a global alliance partner for a number of virtualized eco-platforms. Third, Dell has long been a leader in the x86 server market, delivering third-generation End-to-end automation, high reliability, and strategic virtual solutions through open policy.

Dell delivers complete solutions from server to storage

Hardware systems designed specifically for virtualization from the infrastructure can improve stability and efficiency in virtualization applications, and Dell's PowerEdge m905/m805 Blade server, released this September, is a model for this type of product. Qio Yonglin, senior brand manager of Enterprise products, Dell Greater China, said in the case of M905, the optimized design of the Dell Blade server for virtualized environments is mainly embodied in three aspects: first, considering that virtualization applications tend to consume a large amount of memory, Dell Blades provide the industry's largest memory capacity in design, M905 DIMM memory slots up to 24, the highest can support 192GB ECC DDR2 memory. Second, considering the large demand for I/O from multiple virtual machines, Dell not only puts the storage from the blade on the network, but also provides the extension interface on the switch module. Third, in the Blade Server board embedded hypervisor virtualization software, so that the virtual blade server can be used to open the box.

The event was presented with a m1000e chassis with the PowerEdge M905 blade in it, and in communication with Qio Yonglin, the 51cto.com/cioage.com reporter learned more about Dell's design of the blade server, as well as intent elsewhere. It will be a high power consumption components layout in the server front-end to achieve better cooling effect, patented technology, small flow fan average speed than similar products slower than 30%, and can be intelligent Discovery System power to adjust the speed at any time. The power conversion efficiency of the M905 is as high as 91%, which supports the optional combination of full height and half height blades. These designs not only reduce the power consumption of the whole machine effectively, but also provide convenience and guarantee for the user's management and maintenance, and fully embody the idea of "simplifying it".

As discussed earlier, "Virtualization cannot be limited to servers". At Dell's storage product Technology director Xu Liangmou, front-end host virtualization effectively increases server utilization while also challenging the configuration and management of back-end storage. He told reporters that customers can not only focus on the front-end virtualization, the traditional concept of storage capacity, performance, bandwidth awareness is far from enough.

"The migration of a dynamic virtual machine causes storage I/O to be unbalanced. How do I increase the overall storage bandwidth? How do I ensure that data is not lost during the migration process? Xu Liangmou (Alvin Kho) believes that storage values that conform to the SAN2.0 concept-capacity + capacity virtualization, high performance/High-bandwidth + cloud storage, and strong data protection capabilities-do not affect performance ... The typical product that meets this value is EqualLogic PS 5500E, a product based on unified Fabric (Unified Network) that employs an innovative virtual storage architecture that delivers automated data protection snapshot managers that can be directly integrated into VMware virtual environments ( Auto-snapshot Manager, VMware Edition, and VMware's SRM (Site Recovery Manager) Disaster recovery solution allows seamless linear scaling without impacting business operations, Also has the intelligent automatic management and the self optimization ability.

PostScript

The experience and communication in the field have benefited the author. Although the current user generally believe that virtualization is mainly used to achieve server integration means, but virtualization can do is not limited to this. With the depth of application, users who are sensitive to data security will consider using desktop virtualization to strengthen management, stressing that users of business continuity will attach particular importance to virtual machine migration and protection capabilities, and that users will be able to build dynamic platforms through virtualization technology to achieve the demand for IT resources.