New VMware vSphere Cluster

This month has been busy… very rewarding, but bizzzz-aye! Here’s our latest project come to close… upgrade our existing VMware infrastructure to new hardware to better utilize our existing licenses. Easy enough, right?

Old environment:

3 x HP DL380 G5 servers, each identically configured as such:

  • 2 x Dual Core Xeon Processors (1.6Ghz)
  • 16 GB of DDR2 ECC RAM
  • 1 x 4 Port Gigabit NIC
  • 2 x 850Watt power supplies
  • ESX 3.5 Update 5

Estimated power usage 1,950 watts at 60% utilization. Averaging 650 watts per host – or 17082 kWh for the year

New environment:

Inside of a fully configured sixth generation HP ProLiant DL360
HP DL360 G6

3 x HP DL360 G6 servers, each identically configured as such:

  • 2 x Quad Core Xeon H5540 Processors (2.4Ghz)
  • 54 GB of DDR3 ECC RAM (12 x 4GB + 3 x 2GB
  • 1 x 4 Port Gigabit NIC
  • 2 x 450 Watt power supplies (set for active/passive fault tollerance)
  • ESX 4.0 Update 2

Estimated power usage 480 watts with the same virtual machine count. With a confirmed average of 240 watts for two hosts 0r 4,208kWh for the year. One host is in standby, using less than 1W of power.

We’re currently leveraging vCenter’s Dynamic Power Management feature to shutdown one host because there are enough resources on the other two to maintain all of the virtual machines AND still provide high availability. If we lose a host, HA will reboot the lost VMs on the remaining host – and power up the standby host to provide more resources to the cluster. In the mean time though – we’re saving the earth and money by doing just a little more configuration. As our virtual environment grows we may reach a point where we won’t be able to keep one host powered off, but in the meantime – why not?

Savings:

  • 3 RU of space.
  • 12,874 kWh of electricity annually
  • $1,205 per year in power costs

Also in this environment we took the steps to standardize our vSphere host build so that adding additional hosts or rebuilding any failed hosts is just an install disc and host profile application away from production. Our previous environment was a pre-production proof of concept that got rolled into production without much validation or configuration standardization.

I’m very pleased with the rollout and now that we have modern vSphere cluster attached to our previously installed 28TB NetApp 3140 SAN/NAS cluster – we’re ready to rock into the year with Exchange 2010 and SharePoint 2010 virtualization – estimated savings in power alone is looking to be in the range of $3,000-$4,500 per year. The ROI reports write themselves!