Bladecenter S and VMWare

[willisiw]

We have 2 IBM Bladecenter S Chassis (8886). 
  6 HS21 blades and 3 HS22 Blades across both
  2 SAS RAID Modules in Redundant configuration in each
  2 Nortel Gigabit Ethernet (Layer2/3) Switch in each.

BCS1 is all Virtual Desktops with vmview 4.5
BCS2 is ALL servers on vSphere 4.1 Advanced licenses

We use VMWare Data Recovery to backup EVERY VM to deduped stores on NAS NFS storage.

We have sufficient storage free on each bladecenter to clone every VM from one to the other.  This is an OK backup solution, but I'm looking for great.  We are interested in recommendations on how to get better uptime.


Backstory:
We turned off BCS2 (ALL SERVERs) over the weekend to do firmware update and both of our redundant RAID controllers failed to come back online.  The integrated SAN is fast, but the fact that our fully redundant raid failed at both points was incredibly bad luck.  Everything came back online once we got a good raid controller. The engineers at IBM assure us this is something that almost never happens and I believe them, but in the future, I would like to be able to keep all of my servers running.  We would have migrated the VM's to BCS1, but the Bladecenters do not share storage since the SAN's are internal.  Cloning would have worked but 1.2 TB of servers would have taken some time to clone over a 1 GB connection.

It may be possible to do some link aggregation on the bladecenters with the Nortel Switches to create a VLAN with 2 or 3 GBit, but I do not have a system to test on, only my production servers.

Thanks,

Ian

[Viperman]

So to clarify.  The VMs are running on local storage and you are cloning them from local on one bladecenter to local on another bladecenter?

[willisiw]

The Bladecenter S Chassis has an integrated SAS SAN that can be attached to the blades, but it is isolated to the chassis.

So yes, local.

[Viperman]

It is local to the chasis, but shared among all blades, correct?

[willisiw]

Correct.

I have put together a PowerCLI script to clone all VM's from a particular location to another datastore/host.

It's not fancy, but I can have the cloning run regularly.

I think what I am going to end up with is an iSCSI SAN that all of my VM's run from.

Code:

# PowerCLI Written by Ian Willis
# Written for PowerCLI 4.1
#
# Copy / Clone all virtual machines in a given location to
# a new location & Resource Pool.  Usefull for a non-destructive
# simple backup.  My case: Copy from one storage array to a
# windows file server nfs share.
#
# vcenter server.  You can also include -username and -password here,
# check get-help connect-viserver
$vcenter = "vcenter1"
# source Location, datacenter, folder, or cluster
$sourceLocation = "BCS1_Cluster"
# Target Datastore must exist on target host
$datastore = "FILESERVER_NFS1"
# Target location must exist in vcenter
$tgtlocation = "ServerClones"
# Target Host, must be able to ping from source host
$targethost = "esx1"
# Target Resource Pool, must exist already
$ResourcePool = "ServerBackups"
# backup = true appends date, false does not.
$backup = "true"

# Establish Connection
connect-viserver -server $vcenter

# get list servers to backup
$vmservers = Get-VM -Location $sourceLocation


foreach ($vm in $vmservers)
{
$clone = "TRUE"

if ($clone -eq "TRUE")
{
$vmtarget = $vm.Name
if ($backup -eq "TRUE")  {
$vmtarget = $vmtarget + "_" + (get-date -uformat %Y-%m-%d_%R)
}
write-host -foregroundcolor green Cloning $vm to $vmtarget
new-vm -name $vmtarget -vm $vm -vmhost $targethost -datastore $datastore -ResourcePool $ResourcePool -Location $tgtlocation -DiskStorageFormat thin
}
}

[Viperman]

That is a great script.  Did you make that whole thing up from scratch?

If you are looking for an iSCSI SAN I can get you one for a great price.  I just sold a 28TB SAN to one of my customer for approximately $11K brand new from Dell.

[willisiw]

e-mail me a quote