Using VMware Cluster Features on Dell PowerEdge Servers
Combining virtualization with increasingly powerful servers has allowed many enterprises to run multiple applications on a single server inside isolated virtual machines (VMs). The downside of this type of environment, however, is that a single hardware failure can affect multiple critical systems simultaneously.
To help mitigate this risk, enterprises can take advantage of the VMware High Availability (VMware HA) and Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) features of the VMware Infrastructure 3 platform, which allow VMs to easily migrate to other hosts in a virtualized cluster during maintenance, server failure, and similar situations. Although VMware HA and DRS are separate features, they provide complementary functionality and are typically used together.
Implementing these features on industry standards–based Dell PowerEdge servers can provide cost-effective, enterprise-class high availability and load balancing in virtualized environments. For example, a previous Dell Power Solutions article1 demonstrated that a farm of three two-socket Dell PowerEdge servers can provide higher performance, higher performance per watt, and lower price/performance than two four-socket HP ProLiant servers. By avoiding the centralization of critical VMs on just a few large servers, a data center built on several twosocket servers using VMware HA and DRS can easily recover from the loss of a single server by restarting VMs on other hosts. Administrators can also integrate the Dell OpenManage™ suite with VMware Infrastructure 3 and features such as DRS to create proactive responses to hardware faults and adaptive power management.
This article discusses the basics of VMware HA and DRS and describes tests performed by the Dell Enterprise Technology Center team to help demonstrate their functionality and performance on Dell PowerEdge servers in three common enterprise data center scenarios: planned maintenance, unplanned outages, and workload spikes. For detailed information about VMware HA and DRS, see the VMware Resource Management Guide: ESX Server 3.0.1 and VirtualCenter 2.0.1.3
