Invest in reasonable hardware for virtualization

Mastering the optimal specifications for CPU, memory, storage, redundancy, and networking will help you get the best results in virtualization.

Invest in reasonable hardware for virtualization Picture 1 Virtualization is always attractive to those who want to make the most of the power of physical servers. Virtualization is also intended to save investment costs, reduce operating costs, and maintain flexibility. However, to achieve the highest efficiency for virtualization, you need to master some basic knowledge to develop new infrastructure so that you can achieve your goals.

Here are some preliminary guidelines to help you shop for reasonable hardware for virtualization whether it's with a single server, or focus a group of servers on a full virtualization infrastructure.

The more cores the better the cores

When buying a server, you usually choose CPU first. With the virtualization of servers, the number of cores (CPUs) always outweighs the speed of each core. In many cases, you will be surprised because the number of virtual servers available in a case uses CPUs running at 1.7GHz, as long as there are multiple cores.

If you are financially able to equip servers with Intel's 2.93GHz Westmere chips, just invest. Otherwise, AMD 6-core Opteron 4000 CPUs with clock speeds between 1.7GHz and 2.2GHz are a good choice for many situations. Some servers with two CPUs of this type provide incredible virtualization capabilities for mid-scale.

The long-standing concept of ' faster CPU, faster server ' is only true for single-threaded processing, specialized in performing deep calculations. During normal operation of servers, the CPU is idle quite a lot, and even when it's their turn to process, delay from other components on the system may cause the CPU to be wait. For example, the process of loading data from the disk, from RAM, or through the network. If you choose between a six, eight, or twelve CPU with a lower clock rate and a quad or six-core CPU at a higher clock rate, always prioritize a higher number of cores.

Max RAM

When you plan to use virtual servers, equip as much RAM as possible. RAM capacity determines the number of virtual servers you can run. Attaching 64GB of RAM or more to a server with 12, 16, or 24 cores provides very high virtualization efficiency, and also makes machine prices soar.

Yes, 4GB and 8GB DIMM RAMs are much more expensive than using 2GB DIMMs, but the number of RAM slots on the machine is limited, and of course you don't want to have to buy more physical servers just to increase Enhanced RAM, then you have to pay extra for license to use additional software.

Backup equipment

The downside of this advice is that you always need to invest excessively in a physical server to deal with a broken server. Although suppliers always insist that their servers are durable, disaster can still happen at any time, and your mission is to be ready in every situation.

You also need a system ready for maintenance. If it is not possible to turn off a physical server for 15 minutes to replace a faulty RAM because the remaining servers are incapable of handling the workflow instead of the broken machine, you are having problems, and You really lose one of the main benefits of server virtualization: reducing scheduled shutdown times. When you stop a physical server for maintenance, you want to avoid having to deactivate some virtual servers to prevent the entire system from being overloaded. Therefore, based on the sense of safety, whether it is a bad idea in terms of cost, minimum operation of N +1 machines for N machine needs is absolutely necessary.

Store links

Invest in reasonable hardware for virtualization Picture 2 Every real virtualization platform needs to be built on shared storage. Without this, each server is basically an 'ivory tower', and virtual machines running on these servers cannot be protected against physical server errors. In addition, building and expanding virtualization infrastructure will be more difficult and monotonous without shared hosting. In fact, unless we're talking about extremely small scale virtualization, using shared hosting is not an option but an immutable rule.

So make sure your shared hosting solution is the best possible. Whether you plan to use iSCSI, NFS, or Fiber-Channel, consider the disk import / export needs before you start buying switches, switches, and disks. In many cases, generally SATA drives are suitable for virtual machines, and in some cases, NFS will outperform iSCSI for everyday computing needs. This may lead to you not choosing a preferred hosting brand, but unless you're talking about handling large volumes of disk work, you probably don't need to store SSD or high drives. SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) level.

In fact, unless you are talking about 10 Gigabit network speeds (per second) for each server, using faster, faster storage technologies is unnecessary. And because the hard disk is getting cheaper and cheaper, bypassing traditional RAID 5 is still preferred due to savings, applying RAID 6 or, more ideal, RAID 10 to enhance data performance and safety.

Network connections

Remember, network systems supporting 1 Gigabit speed are cheaper than 10 Gigabit systems, but physical servers with multiple virtual servers running on them always need high bandwidth for network connections to avoid congestion. bottleneck. In fact, virtual servers typically do not use much of 10 Gigabit speed for normal services or read / write data on disk, but some transactional applications will need, so please Try to balance your needs.

Finally, remember that server virtualization is to optimize your infrastructure with the use of fewer physical devices, thus reducing the occurrence of problems and you are also ready to deal with any failure. any component. Operating costs will be reduced by saving electricity and investing in less cooling systems.