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Overview
Microsoft® System Center Virtual Machine Manager provides a comprehensive management solution for the virtualized data center that enables increased physical server utilization and centralized management of virtual machine infrastructure. The central console is built on the familiar System Center Operations Manager interface and provides centralized monitoring and management of virtual machines and physical hosts as well as centralized provisioning of new virtual machines. Virtual Machine Manager greatly simplifies the task of converting physical server or VMware virtual machines to Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 machines.
The management and migration of the virtual machine images is greatly enhanced by maintaining all images on a shared SAN. Sanbolic’s Melio clustered file system and LaScala clustered volume manager are designed to provide multiple Windows servers with concurrent access to shared data on a Fibre Channel or iSCSI SAN. Melio FS provides similar functionality to VMFS in VMware’s Infrastructure 3 management suite. Large numbers of host servers (up to 64) can be given concurrent access to all .VHD files on a shared SAN LUN. There is no need to provision a separate LUN for each .VHD file, and no need to copy files or remap the connection to the LUN when migrating virtual machines. Virtual machines can be easily migrated across physical hosts using the VMM central console in less than 30 seconds.
Melio FS is a fully featured enterprise-class clustered file system and LaScala is a clustered volume manager. The products are easy to install but are designed to provide high performance, highly available shared access to SAN storage. In addition, Sanbolic’s products provides a range of features not supported by VMware’s VMFS including unlimited volume and file sizes, multilayer checkdisk, and full support for most Windows technologies including security ACLs and Active Directory. In addition to enabling virtual machine migration, Sanbolic’s products allow central assignment of application data volumes for virtual machines or physical serves on a SAN, allowing application data to be quickly reassigned when a Windows Server running on a virtual machine is moved across physical hosts, or when a workload is moved from a physical to a virtual server.
This guide provides an overview of the configuration of System Center Virtual Machine Manager with Melio FS.
Hardware and Software Requirements
The installation assumes the following software and hardware has already been installed (this paper describes a configuration with two physical hosts, but multiple hosts can be configured in the same way):***
- Host servers running Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition
- Fibre Channel or iSCSI SAN configured with a shared LUN available to both servers
- GigE Network between host servers
- Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1
- Virtual Machine Manager 2007 RTM (only one instance needed i.e. Server 2)
- Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition SP1 (only one instance needed i.e. Server 1)
- Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 & 3.0
- Windows Remote Management (WinRM)
- Microsoft Core XML Services (MSXML) 6.0
- Windows Server Internet Information Services (IIS)
- Windows PowerShell 1.0
- Sanbolic Melio FS and LaScala Volume Manager
This paper does not describe in detail the installation of Melio and LaScala on the Storage Servers, or the process of configuring a shared volume. However, the installation and configuration takes only a few minutes once the hardware is set up. A detailed description can be found at
http://www.sanbolic.com/pdfs/LaScala_manual.pdf
http://www.sanbolic.com/pdfs/MelioFS_Installation_Guide.pdf
Once the shared volume is created it will be visible to both hosts, and will appear as a local drive. For this example several virtual machines have been created on the shared volume. (Figure 1)
Configuration
After installing the Microsoft and Sanbolic software as described above, the Virtual Machine Manager administrative console can be accessed from any host and will appear as in figure 2. For this example there are two host servers 2k3R2srv2.sanbolic.main and 2k3r2srv1.sanbolic.main.
In order to utilize Melio File System with Virtual Machine Manager, each of the .VHD’s that reside on the Melio formatted volume need to be registered with each of the host servers. To do this we select a server, right click and select the “Properties” option, then select the VM’s tab. Then select “x:” volume and select the test VHD’s, as shown in Figure 3.
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