by Shane Burton, Microsoft Product Specialist, Dell Compellent — November 09, 2010
On-premise private clouds are becoming more popular among the enterprises we work with. These enterprises are virtualizing their storage and server infrastructures to increase efficiency and flexibility while reducing costs. To quickly and effectively manage virtualized IT resources, leading technology vendors, including Compellent, are making it easy by integrating with the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) Self-Service Portal 2.0 Toolkit, a free partner-extensible cloud solution offered by Microsoft.
How does the Self-Service Portal 2.0 work?
The Self-Service Portal pools data center infrastructure resources – from networking to servers to storage – and makes them readily available to individual business units. Using Microsoft PowerShell scripts with Hyper-V and storage systems that integrate with these technologies, such as Compellent Storage Center, organizations can automate the deployment of their virtualized server and storage resources.
It’s all about efficiency and speed. From a data center management standpoint, what the business unit administrator wants to be able to do is quickly provision virtual machines (VM) without a lot of management overhead. That’s where the Self-Service Portal 2.0 comes into play. It provides a web-based interface where administrators can create whatever virtual machine they want, using pre-determined configuration options and pre-loaded VM templates.
Once a request from the business unit administrator is submitted, the system automatically notifies the IT administrator, who simply needs to validate the request and initiate the provisioning process. The Self-Service Portal takes it from there, utilizing built-in automation from Microsoft, Compellent and other DDA partners to rapidly deploy the requested IT services. Advanced PowerShell scripts reduce the manual steps associated with provisioning Windows Server/ Hyper-V VM resources, expediting deployment, ensuring accuracy and allowing administrators to focus on other important projects.
What Compellent brings to the table
Compellent comes to the table with a couple of things. Number one, its advanced storage technology is robust enough to do some pretty complex things from the storage layer at the same time reducing the complexity with operational efficiency for IT administrator. Number two, we’ve incorporated the OS-level integration with Windows Server/Hyper-V into the PowerShell piece. So that’s a huge enabler for us. Not only can we talk to our storage, but we can also talk to the OS itself without requiring special drivers to connect to the server host.
Compellent has created the Compellent Solution Pack for SCVMM SSP 2.0 that essentially incorporates two PowerShell scripts for the Self-Service Portal – one that creates one or more VMs using Compellent Instant Replays, and one that deletes VMs with automatic cleanup. We plan to offer this solution pack later this quarter.
The fluid nature of PowerShell automation
Traditionally, when data center administrators provision Hyper-V VMs using a template in SCVMM, the system created the VMs on the host itself using VHD copies via the LAN. The VHD is already sys prepped, providing a ready-to-deploy template complete with OS and applications. However, since each VM consumes just as much disk capacity as the base OS image – e.g., 10 GB – the provisioning process is time consuming and wastes disk space. Creating just one VM with this approach takes 5 to 20 minutes and, in this case, utilizes 10 GB or more of capacity.
With the Compellent “create VM” PowerShell script developed for the Self Service Portal, administrators can deploy the same Hyper-V VM in 20 to 30 seconds once the VHD has been sys prepped. Instead of creating full copies of the VHD via LAN, the script utilizes a gold image captured on the SAN as a snapshot. Each VM created shares the same gold image, and the only capacity consumed beyond that base image is the negligible space required for the unique characteristics of each VM.
For example, a small organization with four department that each need 25 physical boxes to do their work would traditionally be required to fill out a procurement order, put the OS on the hardware and ensure that there is enough energy to power 100 machines in the data center. The entire process would take about a week. With Compellent and the Self-Service Portal, it takes this organization 20-30 seconds to deploy a virtual machine. When deploying 100 machines required by the business, 12GB would be taken by the OS on each machine, meaning that an additional 1.2TB would be taken up just by the OS across the 100 machines. The same scenario on the Compellent would add up to 112 GB of space for the OS.
If changing business needs call for one or more VMs to be removed, the data center administrator can utilize the “delete VM” script. This script not only deletes the VM, but also performs a complete cleanup process – from removing the volume associated with the VM to unmounting the VHD and rescanning to ensure it has been removed.
From the beginning to the end – from the application and the OS to the storage layer, this process is completely fluid and abstracted from the general user. A few clicks on the self-service portal page and the business unit admin is all done. That is what Fluid Data is all about.
To learn more about the Self-Service Portal, please read the Microsoft blog.
by Bob Oas, Marketing Communications Manager, Dell Compellent — June 15, 2010
Over the past several weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to work with our Technical Solutions team to develop a series of papers. The idea was to create Technical Solution Briefs that not only discuss the integration between Compellent storage and leading third-party technologies, but provide examples of the solutions at work in real-world environments. Three of the five docs have been released, with two more scheduled to hit the street by June 25. You can download them from Compellent’s Resource Library.
Topics of the papers include:
For those of you who attended C-Drive, these topics may remind you of the Solution Sessions introduced this year. Also delivered by the Technical Solutions team, those breakouts demonstrated how integrated solutions cut time, cost and risk. The new Technical Solution Briefs are an extension of that effort, and we hope you find them useful when considering ways to manage your data smarter. Please recommend other topics to cover. Just tweet me at @bob_oas or email me directly at bob.oas@compellent.com. I’ll bring your ideas to the team in July as we map out phase two.
by Larry Aszmann, Chief Technology Officer (retired), Dell Compellent — March 19, 2008
In the summer of 1995, I was in Phil Soran’s basement along with John Guider trying to create a business plan that we could execute together. That’s when the epiphany came. What if we could aggregate storage resources in one place, offer up the performance of the entire storage pool for any server, and along the way get rid of a bunch of extra hardware? The idea became virtualized storage and the start of a storage company that we eventually sold in 2000 prior to founding Compellent. Since then, the notion of storage virtualization—doing a lot more with a lot less—has been improved upon by us and the industry.
After virtualizing your data center, you could have one-tenth of the hardware that you had before, and you are able to use the remaining hardware a lot more efficiently. That’s the level of efficiency end users are going to need in today’s market. InformationWeek cited an HP survey that says one-third of enterprise data centers will not be able to meet the demands put upon them in the next 2 to 5 years.
Server virtualization solutions, such as Citrix , Virtual Iron and VMware, all have their strong points and Compellent, because of our storage virtualization, works seamlessly with them all. Today, Microsoft announced the release candidate for Hyper-V is ready. Here’s what we had to say about it.
When companies deploy storage and server systems the old fashioned, non-virtualized way, they are wasting resources. How can you “economize” your data center—get more out of the existing infrastructure instead of having to add more power, cooling or space? The simple answer is: virtualize your storage first, and then virtualize your servers. Why virtualize storage first? It’s extremely difficult to virtualize servers and manage them if your virtual machines are hosted on hardware with internal disk drives or directly attached to storage.
The testing on Hyper-V continues (many of our channel partners have already been working with the beta) and the market should be excited about the clarity that Microsoft is bringing to its virtualization strategy. Technology choice for removing extra hardware and aggregating resources is worth getting excited about.