EMC Integrated Infrastructure for VMware Business Continuity Enabled by EMC Celerra and VMware vcenter Site Recovery Manager Reference Architecture
Copyright 2009 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published July, 2009 EMC believes the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice. Benchmark results are highly dependent upon workload, specific application requirements, and system design and implementation. Relative system performance will vary as a result of these and other factors. Therefore, this workload should not be used as a substitute for a specific customer application benchmark when critical capacity planning and/or product evaluation decisions are contemplated. All performance data contained in this report was obtained in a rigorously controlled environment. Results obtained in other operating environments may vary significantly. EMC Corporation does not warrant or represent that a user can or will achieve similar performance expressed in transactions per minute. No warranty of system performance or price/performance is expressed or implied in this document. Use, copying, and distribution of any EMC software described in this publication requires an applicable software license. For the most up-to-date listing of EMC product names, see EMC Corporation Trademarks on EMC.com. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. Part number: H6400.1 2
Table of Contents Reference architecture overview...4 Key components...5 Environment and server profile...8 Storage layout and configuration...10 Hardware and software resources...11 Use Cases...12 Conclusion...13 3
Reference architecture overview Overview The EMC Global Solution Center labs reflect real-world deployments in which solutions are developed, designed, tested, tuned, and documented to address customer challenges and meet key business and technical objectives. With EMC Proven Solutions customers reduce the complexity, costs, and risks of deploying new technology. Document purpose This document describes the reference architecture of the EMC Integrated Infrastructure for VMware Business Continuity Enabled by EMC Celerra and VMware vcenter Site Recovery Manager solution, which was tested and validated by EMC s Global Solutions organization. Solution purpose The solution s purpose is to demonstrate a fully integrated virtualized business continuity (DR) solution, incorporating VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 as the server virtualization platform and SRM as the Virtual Machine failover mechanism. The business challenge Businesses today face the challenge of planning maintenance operations in the wake of site disasters, and bringing critical applications and data online quickly, with little or no data loss. Tested, validated plans are critical to ensuring the continuation of your business and the protection of your revenue. The consolidation and virtualization of critical business applications is crucial to maximizing Data Center efficiency; however, this can add a layer of complexity in terms of your disaster recovery plans. These challenges demand a solution that offers effective, affordable, and efficient protection of these critical business functions while offering the flexibility to ensure the needs of different applications are met. The technology solution VMware s Virtual Infrastructure suite of products, including ESX Server and Site Recovery Manager, improves the efficiency and availability of systems and applications while reducing costs by consolidating resources. EMC Celerra Networked Storage provides replication capabilities through Celerra Replicator V2, and EMC Replication Manager provides application consistency, ensuring that information and services are continuously available to users. Scope This document, which combines well-documented technology options, recommended technology products, and a characterization of the technology results, may be leveraged prior to implementing a solution in your enterprise. This document is not intended to be a comprehensive guide to every aspect of the solution. 4
Key components Introduction This section briefly describes the components used in this solution, including: EMC Celerra networked storage EMC Replication Manager EMC Avamar VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 VMware Site Recovery Manager Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 EMC Celerra networked storage The Celerra unified storage platform is a flexible, affordable, and powerful network storage system. The Celerra NS-120 delivers NAS, iscsi, Fibre Channel, and MPFS capabilities to consolidate application storage and file servers. Easy to deploy and simple to manage, the Celerra NS-120 provides unified storage for customers looking for enterprise-class capabilities packaged for specific applications, departments, or locations, and flexibility to upgrade to Fibre Channel SAN and Celerra Multi-Path File System (MPFS) connectivity for applications that require maximum throughput. Celerra unified storage platforms also offer a full suite of advanced functionality: Multi-protocol access NAS, iscsi, Fibre Channel, and MPFS in a single-box solution. Celerra Data Deduplication with built-in compression decreases file system capacity requirements. Robust Celerra SnapSure and Celerra Replicator capabilities offer data protection. Celerra FileMover API allows automated, policy-based movement of files between tiers of storage. Celerra File-Level Retention provides disk-based WORM functionality with Compliant or Enterprise options. Automated Volume Management and Celerra Virtual Provisioning improve utilization and simplify provisioning. Celerra Startup Assistant streamlines software initialization Celerra MPFS delivers improved performance and scalability over traditional NAS deployments. 5
EMC Replication Manager Replication Manager automates and simplifies management of disk-based replicas in support of EMC point-in-time replica software, such as: TimeFinder family SnapView SAN Copy Celerra Replicator, and SnapSure for iscsi Celerra systems. Replication Manager orchestrates critical business applications, and underlying EMC replication technologies to create and manage point-in-time replicas at the application level for a variety of purposes - including backup acceleration, instant restore, development, simulation, repurposing, and migrating data to lower-cost storage. EMC Avamar EMC Avamar backup and recovery products transform the entire data-protection process using patented global, data de-duplication technology, and solves traditional backup challenges by reducing the size of backup data at the source, before it is transferred across the LAN/WAN and stored to disk. Avamar identifies redundant sub-file data segments across servers, systems, and sites worldwide, ensuring that backup data is stored only once. All backups are full backups and data can be immediately recovered in a single step. With Avamar software, each node configured in an Avamar server grid is capable of supporting 1 TB or 2 TB of de-duplicated backup capacity and scales up to 32 TB (the equivalent of up to 1.1 PB of traditional storage, depending on backup method and retention period). VMware Infrastructure 3 VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 is an infrastructure virtualization suite providing virtualization management resource optimization application availability, and operational automation capabilities in an integrated package. VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 virtualizes and aggregates the underlying physical hardware resources across multiple systems and provides pools of virtual resources to the data center, while minimizing Total Cost Of Ownership (TCO) of computing infrastructure by increasing resource utilization decreasing the number of servers and all associated costs, and maximizing server manageability. 6
VMware Site Recovery Manager VMware Site Recovery Manager is a software application that provides disaster recovery automation for virtual machines. SRM interfaces with array- and networkbased storage vendor replication technology to orchestrate both the testing and initiation of disaster recovery failover scenarios for virtualized environments. In addition, SRM has the ability to communicate with non-virtualized systems, through the use of scripts that can be inserted within the recovery plan. Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, the latest version of Microsoft Exchange Server, is the industry s leading server for email, calendaring and unified messaging, and has been designed specifically to meet today s business and IT challenges while delivering on the capabilities demanded by mobile workforces. Benefits include: Built-in protection from spam, viruses, spoofing and snooping, system downtime and compliance risk Anywhere access to vital communications such as email, voicemail and calendars from a variety of clients and devices Operational efficiency to help optimize IT infrastructure investments and improve IT productivity 7
Environment and server profile Environment configuration The configuration depicted in this solution consists of two Integrated Infrastructure for VMware Enabled By Celerra racks, each of which is configured with 5 node ESX Clusters hosting a 1K Very Heavy Exchange 2007 user environment (Exchange Virtual machines as well as Infrastructure VM s such as Active Directory) and a Distributed File Server configuration containing two 100GB LUNs for file shares between two File Server virtual Machines. Celerra Replicator V2 was used to replicate the iscsi LUNs between the two storage arrays and Replication Manager was used to obtain application consistent copies of the Exchange databases for recovery on the DR site. VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) was used to manage the automation of recovery of Virtual Machines from the Protected Virtual machines from the Protected Site to the Recovery Site. The figure below illustrates the environment configuration: Mixed workload environment This solution bases its validated build design and test results on the following mixed workload environment: Microsoft Exchange 2007 1,000 Very Heavy (0.50 IOPs) users Microsoft Distributed File Server (DFS) 200GB capacity Virtualized application environment The virtualized application environment is comprised of VMs, including: One Microsoft Exchange 2007 mailbox server Two Microsoft Exchange 2007 HUB/CAS servers (one per site) Two Microsoft Windows 2003 File Servers Three Microsoft Windows 2003 Active Directory Domain Controllers/Global Catalog Servers (two at Primary site and one at failover site) 8
Virtualized infrastructure environment The virtualized infrastructure environment is comprised of VMs, including: Two Microsoft Windows 2003 vcenter/srm servers (one per site) Two Microsoft Windows 2003 Replication Manager servers (one per site) Exchange Server 2007 Profile The table below provides the Exchange Server 2007 Profile used in this solution. Parameter Value Number of Exchange users 1000 IOPs per user.50 IOPs (Very Heavy) Read/Write Ratio 1:1 Number of users per server 1000 Number of ESG's per server 4 Number of mail databases per ESG 1 Number of users per mail database 250 Mailbox size Database LUN size Log LUN size 350 MB 132 GB 26 GB 9
Storage layout and configuration Virtual machine VMDK files The Virtual machine VMDK files reside on EMC Celerra RAID 5 File Systems s across two datastore LUN s. Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 binary files The Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 binary files reside on EMC Celerra RAID 5 file systems. Database files and log files reside on RAID1/0 file systems. Microsoft Exchange Server The Exchange Server contains four databases and four storage groups (based on the Microsoft guideline of one database file per storage group). Each database file resides in its own iscsi LUN and is presented as a Physical Raw Device Mapping (prdm) to the Mailbox virtual machine. The Celerra File System is striped across two RAID 1 groups (four disks). The database log files reside in their own iscsi LUN and are presented as Physical Raw Device Mapping s (prdm s) to the Mailbox virtual machine. The Celerra File System resides in a single RAID 1 group (two disks). File Server LUNs The File Server LUNs reside on RAID 5 File Systems and are presented as VMDK files to the virtual machines. Storage configurations The table below displays the storage configurations used in this solution. File Or Activity Type Number of iscsi LUNs RAID Level Type VMDK/OS Files 2 RAID 5 FC Exchange Database 4 RAID 1 FC Exchange Logs 4 RAID 1 FC File Server DFS 1 RAID 5 FC 10
Hardware and software resources Hardware Resources The table below provides the hardware resources used in the validated solution. Name Quantity Configuration Dell 2950 2U servers 10 NS-120 Storage Array 2 2 socket, quad core, 32GB RAM, 2x73-GB internal disks - Raid (1), 10 network interfaces (1GigE) - 5 Per Site Configured to support NFS, and ISCSI protocols - 1 Per Site Celerra DAE Storage Enclosures 6 (15/300GB/15K FC Drives per enclosure) - 3 Per Site Avamar Backup Datastore 2 Cisco 3750-E Ethernet Switch 4 Single Node/High Density 2TB capacity (equivalent to 70TB traditional) - 1 Per Site 48 Port 10/100/1000 Ethernet in Stackable configuration - 2 Per Site Software resources The table below provides the software resources used in the validated solution. Title Version VMware ESX 3.5 Update 4 VMware ESX Virtual Center (HA, DRS, vmotion) 2.5 Update 4 VMware Site Recovery Manager 1.0 Update 1 Patch 2 Celerra Manager 5.6 Avamar Backup Software 4.1.1470 EMC Replication Manager 5.2.1.0 Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 SP1 11
Use Cases Simplified Remote Deployment Enabled by EMC Celerra and VMware vcenter Site Recovery Manager is ideally suited to support application and business needs in remote offices. This solution enables customers to deploy a consistent, virtualized infrastructure across remote locations ensuring that the revenue and business at these locations is protected with a robust disaster recovery solution. At these sites, customers can use one, integrated solution and consolidate applications into one infrastructure. With this level of consistency, customers are able to reduce maintenance costs while delivering consistently to service level agreements across all remote locations. The disaster recovery capabilities ensure information and application availability supporting your business continuance objectives. Application Deployment is a general purpose virtualized data center on a consolidated platform enabling fast deployment of business applications. Customers can quickly deploy Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure to realize their return on their hardware and software investments. Additionally, customers can consolidate multiple applications into this one environment, reducing management and maintenance costs. With robust disaster recovery capabilities, companies can feel comfortable deploying these missioncritical applications onsite as information will always be available, protecting the business and the revenue. Disaster Recovery Infrastructure Deployment enables you to quickly implement an infrastructure to failover your information and applications in the event of a disaster or other datacenter outage. With this solution, you can have a remote site deployed and ready for failover in one day versus weeks of planning and implementation, offering you a significant savings. With this solution, you minimize business interruption and protect business plans and revenue. 12
Conclusion Conclusion Enabled by EMC Celerra and VMware vcenter Site Recovery Manager uses VMware Infrastructure 3 with Site Recovery Manager and EMC Avamar and Replication Manager for server consolidation and protection of application data such as Microsoft Exchange, providing customers with a fault tolerant solution that: Reduces configuration time by up to 66 percent Reduces deployment time by up to 50 percent Reduces disaster recovery planning by up to 90 percent VMware Infrastructure 3 with iscsi scalability provides customers with the knowledge that as their company grows, or as consolidation efforts increase, Integrated Infrastructure For VMware can be used across locations to meet their business needs, while their users continue to enjoy productive Outlook and Exchange experiences. This solution offers customers the ability to quickly implement a virtualized infrastructure to support their mission critical applications and ensures business continuance with a robust disaster recovery architecture while significantly reducing costs. Learn more To learn more about this and other solutions, contact an EMC representative or visit www.emc.com/solutions. 13