1. VIRTUALIZE ALL THE THINGS!
Yes….all the things!
Presented by:
David Pechon, Jr.
MCSA, VCP5-DCV

2. 2

3. WHO DOES THIS GUY THINK HE IS?
Started IT career with an enlistment in the US Army in 1997 as an Information Systems
Operator/Analyst. Stationed at Fort Polk, LA; Youngsan Army Garrison in Seoul, South Korea;
and Fort Bragg, NC. (never airborne, instead a dirty nasty leg)
Worked for a loan servicing company and three different banks in SE Louisiana, as well as a
consulting business from a small MSP in New Orleans to a large systems integrator based in
Denver.
Started working at Sparkhound in February 2014, specializing in virtualization, storage,
messaging and identity management
Held certifications from Microsoft, VMware, NetApp, CommVault and SyncSort (now Catalogic
Software).
Married to my wife Clare of 8 years with two children and currently resides in Ponchatoula, LA
Avid Chicago Cubs fan; enjoys fish, fine beers and grilling outdoors.
Fun fact: I was in North Korea once….for about 10 minutes….during a DMZ tour.
david.pechon@sparkhound.com
@davidpechon
http://linkedin.com/in/davidpechonjr

4. …AND WHY DOES HE WANT TO
VIRTUALIZE EVERYTHING?
Get more for less: We can utilize what would otherwise be wasted compute resources
from less servers compared to a purely physical environment. This allows for smaller
datacenter footprint, denser environments, and less cooling and electrical costs.
Decouple software from the hardware and in some cases, applications from the OS
allowing for faster recovery time objectives, faster provisioning, and flexible disaster
recovery.
Virtualization has been in datacenters for decades running mission critical workloads.
Today’s x86 based hypervisors

5. WHAT VIRTUALIZATION IS AND IS NOT
Virtualization is:
Running more than one operating system in a virtual machine on a host by use of a hypervisor
Isolated user space containers of a single operating system that share an OS kernel (OS level
virtualization)
An encapsulation of applications from a server, allowing an application to run on another computer
that it is not installed on (App virtualization)
Virtualization is NOT:
The cloud. Virtualization is part of a cloud solution but virtualization alone is not “the cloud”.
Emulation. A hypervisor does not translate code from different processors ( e.g. a CISC based x86
processor to a RISC based Power processor).

6. BRIEF HISTORY OF VIRTUALIZAION
1972: IBM System 370 with
the VM OS is the first instance
of the use of a hypervisor, a
control program that managed
resources for each user in a
virtual machine
1998: VMware comes out of stealth mode,
introduces VMware Workstation, a type 2
hypervisor. becoming the first instance of Intel
x86 virtualization.
VMware would release ESX Server, a type 1
hypervisor that runs on bare metal in 2002
2008: Microsoft introduces
Hyper-V, a Type 1 hypervisor
based on the Windows kernel.
2003: Xen is introduced as an open
source type 1 hypervisor. Xen
introduced paravirtualization, where
hardware is not simulated.
2005: Sun releases Solaris Containers, a
virtualization method that allows for
separate zones that have their own
settings and applications but share
common OS services and kernel1989: Citrix licenses OS/2 source code
from Microsoft and later Windows NT
code to create WinFrame, a multiuser
Windows environment that allowed
multiple desktop sessions on a single
Windows server.
2007: Kernel Virtual Manager or
KVM is a Linux based hypervisor
was merged into the mainline
Linux Kernel.

7. VIRTUALIZATION MYTHS
Lies, damned lies, and FUD

8. VIRTUALIZATION IS EXPENSIVE
FACT: Virtualization allows you to drive down capital costs by
reducing the amount of hardware and licensing costs.
Operational costs are driven down in the form of less energy
and cooling consumption, less datacenter space needed,
reduced maintenance contracts, and reduced administrative
overhead.

9. VIRTUALIZATION IS NOT SECURE
FACT: Modern hypervisors are extremely secure in
terms of role based administration, encryption,
multi-tenancy support, and regulatory compliance.

10. VIRTUALIZATION IS DIFFICULT
TO MANAGE
FACT: VMware and Microsoft have added many ways to manage virtualization environments
through orchestration and automation.
VMware vSphere has vCenter Server, vCenter Orchestrator, and vRealize. Hyper-V uses
System Center Virtual Machine Manager and System Center Operations Manager. Both
vSphere and Hyper-V support PowerShell.
Virtualization has allowed IT shops to bring services and applications to the business much
faster than compared to physical environments.

11. FACT: Both vSphere and Hyper-V are certified to run some of
the most demanding applications such as SAP HANA. Virtual
machine limits for resources for both hosts and VMs for either
hypervisor far exceed the recommended system requirements
for nearly any application off the shelf.
VIRTUALIZATION WILL BOTTLENECK
SYSTEM PERFORMANCE

12. VIRTUALIZATION IS ONLY FOR
SERVERS
FACT: Servers, desktops, storage, and networking
are some of the many things that can be virtualized.
Virtualization is allowing people to run software
defined infrastructure on commodity x86 hardware.

13. YES, YOUR APPLICATION WILL RUN
Stop running your datacenter like its still 1998.

14. 1998 WAS A GREAT YEAR…
I had more hair and was in great shape
Movies were actually good
Cell phones were indestructible
Google wasn’t evil.
Britney Spears was America’s sweetheart.

15. …BUT NOT FOR MANAGING DATACENTERS
So why are you still running on bare metal servers?

16. HYPERVISOR LIMITS
480 Logical Processors per host 320 Logical Processors per host
6 TB (12TB supported by some server OEMs) 4 TB RAM
64 nodes per vSphere cluster 64 nodes per Hyper-V cluster
Tightly controlled hardware compatibility list that supports
a wide array of manufactures and supports nearly all
commercially available operating systems
Runs on any hardware with Windows drivers. Supports all
versions of Windows and most popular Linux distributions.

17. VIRTUAL MACHINE LIMITS
128 Virtual CPUs per VM 64 Virtual CPUs per VM
4 TB per VM 1 TB per VM
62 TB virtual disk size limit 64 TB virtual disk size (VHDX), 2 TB (VHD)
Up to 10 network adaptors 12 network adaptors

18. WHY VIRTUALIZATION IS AWESOME
Bet’cha didn’t know anything about this, huh?

19. VSPHERE FAULT TOLERANCE
vSphere HA supports the ability to restart a virtual
machine if a host fails. The problem is that this will
cause a service disruption as the VM restarts on
another host.
Introduced in vSphere 5.0, Fault Tolerance runs a copy of a VM
on another host, while sending CPU and other IO to the
secondary VM. In the even of a host failure, the secondary VM
automatically takes over as the host and users won’t know the
difference.

20. VIRTUAL VOLUMES (VVOLS)
vVOLs were introduced in
vSphere 6.
Storage is abstracted through a
virtual datastore rather than VMFS
or NFS volumes. A protocol
endpoint can point to a SAN, NAS,
or both.
The virtual disk now becomes the
primary unit of data management
at the array level
This allows VM admins greater
control over storage resources
for provisioning and
performance tuning allowing it
to be more policy driven.
vVOLs supported by these
vendors:

21. DYNAMIC MEMORY
Hyper-V has the ability to
dynamically assign memory to
supported operating systems.
Rather than assign a fixed amount
of memory to allocate to a VM,
you would give it a minimum, to
allow for startup, and a maximum.
This can allow you to
overprovision and run slightly
denser virtual environments.

22. OS LEVEL VIRTUALIZATION
Operating system level virtualization like
Docker, BSD Jails, or Solaris Zones allows
you to split a single Operating system
into isolated containers.
Applications are placed in isolated
containers but share operating system
resources.
This allows admins and developers to
test/QA. alongside production on the
exact same platform. This can also allow
for rapid provisioning of application
services.

23. SOFTWARE DEFINED.
Everywhere and everything.

24. THE SOFTWARE DEFINED DATACENTER
Infrastructure
Com put e Virt ualizat ion
Net w ork Virt ualizat ion
St orage Virt ualizat ion
In the past few years, we
started to see infrastructure
become virtualized on
commodity x86 hardware
Rather than run specialized
hardware to perform a
single task, software can
replace traditional hardware
appliances.

25. THE SOFTWARE DEFINED DATACENTER
Because we’re now able to de-
couple software from the
hardware, we can fully automate
provisioning of services and
deliver business ready
infrastructure in a matter of
minutes in what used to take in
days.
Automation tasks can be
programmed as code, hence
merging the roles of systems
administrator and developer into
one, known as “Dev Ops.”
Infrastructure
Com put e Virt ualizat ion
Net w ork Virt ualizat i on
St orage Virt ualizat ion
Automation

26. THE SOFTWARE DEFINED DATACENTER
Now that we can automate and
deliver infrastructure, we can deliver
any application, anytime, anywhere.
In fact, services can be delivered to
customers on demand just like
picking an application from an app
store. All of which based on role
based policies and procedures.
Infrastructure
Com put e Virt ualizat ion
Net w ork Virt ualizat i on
St orage Vi rt ual izat ion
AutomationApplication

27. IN CONCLUSION
There’s no harm in virtualizing anything. Just about every off the shelf application
supports it.
Virtualization can help you get off old hardware and keep legacy systems till they’re
ready to be decommissioned.
Virtualization allows you to provision services faster, recover from disasters faster, and
ensure better uptime compared to physical only methods.
Software defined EVERYTHING is the future. Get used to it or get used to saying
“would you like fries with that?”