Virtual machines get popular within a short period of time with the improvement of the x86 server performance and the virtualized IT infrastructure's functions and availability. More and more critical applications of enterprises are running on virtual machines rather than physical machines. The IDC survey reveals that more than 40% of newly-founded enterprises deploy their critical applications, including Oracle, Exchange, and SQL, in a virtualized environment.

Considering the IT system complexity and the importance of the business continuity, CIOs of enterprises must resolve the following problems before they deploy critical applications on a virtualized platform.

• Whether the performance of virtual machines and storage devices can meet the service requirements and how to ensure the response speed of critical applications?
• In a virtualized environment, physical servers and storage devices carry more services and data. Therefore, device faults exert huge adverse impacts on business continuity. How to reduce system breakdown risks, shorten service interruption time, and prevent losses caused by service interruption?
• How to simplify the system management, optimization, tuning, and maintenance to reduce adverse impacts on services?

Huawei VMware critical application solution resolves previously described problems and effectively helps enterprises deploy critical applications in a virtualized environment.

Considering performance, availability, business continuity, management, maintenance, resource utilization ratio, and cost, Huawei VMware critical application solution offers a comprehensive and optimal design that helps small- and medium-sized enterprises deploy critical applications, such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle DB, on the VMware vSphere 5.0 platform.

This solution shows how to configure VMware HA and DRS on the VMware vSphere platform to ensure high local availability of virtual machines and load balancing among servers. Database Availability Group (DAG) can be configured for the Exchange server to improve the Exchange availability. Real Application Cluster (RAC) can be configured for the Oracle server to improve the Oracle availability and load balancing.

Servers are connected to Huawei OceanStor S5000T series storage devices (S5000T series storage devices for short) over Fibre Channel links, maximizing the storage performance. Meanwhile, networks and Fibre Channel links are redundant to prevent the single link failure, ensuring high storage availability.

The design of high availability is applicable to the storage layer, virtual machine layer, and application server layer, preventing a single point of failure and ensuring the system availability. Besides, the solution employs S5000T series storage devices. The S5000T series storage devices support VAAI ports, provide functions such as SmartCache and dynamic storage tiering (DST), and optimize the VASA management port. Therefore, this solution delivers high availability as well as high performance and easy management.

Combining the high-performance S5000T series storage devices and the flexible, energy-saving, and reliable VMware, the VMware critical application solution helps small- and medium-sized enterprises deploy critical applications such as Exchange 2010, SQL Server 2008 R2, and Oracle 11g R2. This solution effectively resolves problems related to availability, performance, and management of critical applications.

Multiple Protection Mechanisms for Applications

The high availability design is applicable to the storage layer, virtual machine layer, and application server layer, shortening service interruption time and reducing data loss risks caused by system breakdown.

High-Performance and Efficient Platform

S5000T series storage devices support intelligent data cache and DST, improving storage performance; provide the QoS control function, ensuring the response speed of critical applications; adopt the thin provisioning and intelligent storage and access technologies, eliminating the need for systems of a higher configuration. Besides, S5000T series storage devices are integrated with vSphere over the VAAI port. Operations consuming too many resources are transferred from vSphere ESXi Server to the storage system, improving the performance of the VMware infrastructure.

Flexible Application Performance Acceleration Methods

Different performance acceleration methods are available for different types of applications. Intelligent data cache and DST are applied to the SQL Server and Oracle 11g databases, improving the technical performance measurement (TPM) of the SQL Server database and Oracle database by more than 80% and 20% respectively, shortening the average response time of the SQL Server database and Oracle database by more than 95% and 98% respectively. Thin provisioning is applied to Exchange, reducing 50% cost and implementing quick service start.

Unified Management

S5000T series storage devices provides an add-in which allows administrators to view disk capacity, performance, mapping modes, and thin provisioning status of T series storage devices on the VMware vCenter. Administrators can maintain and manage storage devices on a single platform, simplifying management and reducing maintenance costs.

Building Confidence

The VMware critical application solution is designed to deploy critical applications of small- and medium-sized enterprises on a virtualized platform. This solution ensures high performance and easy management of critical applications and provides multiple protection mechanisms for critical applications, dismissing enterprises' doubt about the virtualized platform.

Fully Exploiting Virtualization

This solution helps enterprises fully virtualize the IT infrastructure. Therefore, customers can benefit from the high-efficiency, high-reliability, easy-to-manage, and cost-effective virtualization technology which improves the IT service quality.