Enabling Next Gen Multi-Datacenter Resilience at Kennards HireRichard Fox-SmithIT Manager, Kennards Hire

Michael ChanterGM Cloud Services, Frontline Systems

VIR322

Kennards HireAustralia’s leading hire company

All-Australian family-owned business Simple business model: hire tools, equipment and vehicles Over 125 branch stores900 employees38,000 Customers850,000 TransactionsAnnual revenues > $200 millionwww.kennards.com.au

Kennards HireA potted IT history

2008 : Mixed Technology stackA bit of everything:

Databases: DB2, LOTUS NOTES, SQL Server 2005/2000, MySQL….Operating Systems: Server 2003, Server 2000, Linux – RedHat Enterprise, Fedora Core 3/6,VMware for VDI….Email: Lotus Notes

Server Infrastructure at every branch (100+ servers Fedora Core 3 or 6, DB2, Propriety POS)

TAKE OUT: Extremely difficult to manage

Kennards HireA potted IT history

2008: Frontline Systems engaged as strategic partner Frontline roadmap adhered to 2 underlying principles

Drive reductions in complexity and costEmbrace Infrastructure Optimisation approach

BasicStandardis

edRationalis

edDynamic

Kennards HireWhere we are today

Key decisionsMove to Microsoft stack – adoption of “Microsoft first” Move to highly virtualised DC (Frontline & Citrix)Over 3 years, have achieved a Rationalised environment

Basico Starting Pointo Non-

Homogenous

Standardised

o Microsoft Stacko Move to Data

Centre

Rationalised

o Virtual DC (Citrix)o System Center

2007

Dynamic

Kennards HireCurrent state eye chart

Kennards HireCurrent state

Core

Infr

ast

ruct

ure

Tier

1 A

pplic

ati

ons

(mis

sion c

riti

cal)

Tier

2 A

pplic

ati

ons

Kennards HireMission Critical Applications

Tier

1 A

pplic

ati

ons

(mis

sion c

riti

cal)

Core

Infr

ast

ruct

ureCore infrastructure is enabler

Baseplan ERPPOSCore to hire ops

Payroll

Kennards HireCurrent state

Core infrastructure is enabler

Microsoft core infrastructureServer 2008 R2Active DirectoryExchange 2007SQL Server 2008 R2System Centre 2007Forefront Data Protection

Citrix Virtualisation StackXenApp 5.0Xen Server 5.6

Core

Infr

ast

ruct

ure

Kennards HireIT team

IT Manager

CIO

Change Manager

TesterSenior Developer

InfrastructureEngineer

DeveloperHelp Desk 1 Help Desk 3Help Desk 2

Current architecture allows 900 Employees : 10 IT Folk

Kennards HireIT team

IT Manager

CIO

Change Manager

TesterSenior Developer

InfrastructureEngineer

DeveloperHelp Desk 1 Help Desk 3Help Desk 2

Operations

Current architecture allows 900 Employees : 10 IT Folk

Kennards HireIT team

IT Manager

CIO

Change Manager

TesterSenior Developer

InfrastructureEngineer

DeveloperHelp Desk 1

Operations

Help Desk 2 Help Desk 3

Current architecture allows 900 Employees : 10 IT Folk

Kennards HireIT team

IT is very flat, very lean

IT Manager

CIO

Change Manager

TesterSenior Developer

InfrastructureEngineer

DeveloperHelp Desk 1

Operations

Help Desk 2 Help Desk 3

Kennards HireNext Steps in our Strategic Program

4 business driversReview virtualisation platformIncrease manageability across the whole IT environmentDeliver multi-datacentre DRMove to a ‘Cloud First’ architecture

Basico Starting Pointo Non-

Homogenous

Standardised

o Microsoft Stacko Move to Data

Centre

Rationalised

o Virtiual DC (Citrix)o System Centre

2007

Dynamic

Kennards HireServer 2012 RDP program

Scenario #2: “Moving Beyond Virtualisation to Build Cloud Optimised IT”

Test out Server 2012 – working with RedmondGet a hands-on feel for how ready it isWhat it can do for Kennards @ the Datacentre?

Looked at the followingHA on VM’s HyperV ReplicaLive Migration (Shared Nothing).Storage Options

Kennards HirePilot Setup

Layer 3 (Routing)HP ProCurve 2510G-24

Switch

IBM x3650 M3 – Node 2

2 Node Hyper-V Cluster Windows

2012 RC

IBM x3650 M3 – Node 1

NIC Team

NIC Team

Production – vlan 300

Cluster \ live – vlan 200

Management – vlan 100

iSCSI – vlan 400

NIC Team or MPIO for iSCSI

.BI N .VSV .XML

.VHD

Quorum + CSV

.BI N .VSV .XML

.VHD

CSVsiSCSI Target \ File Server

ClusterWindows 2012 RC

iSCSI Storage

IBM x3465 x 300GB for Storage

Spaces

SMB Share\\fileservername\

sharename

Kennards HireHigh Availability on VM’s

VM’s highly available across the cluster: in the event of a host failure, the VM will automatically restart on the available host.

Would improve our uptime to the branch, have had a small number of incidents where this feature would have saved 20-30 mins of outage on certain applications.

Builds on our commitment to the branch/business

Key features from VMM 2012 (requires SP1) will allow us to leverage the full capability. e.g. intelligent placement for capacity optimization.

Kennards HireHigh Availability on VM’s

Learnings:For Pilot utilised LACP : Native NIC teaming within Server 2012. No need for 3rd party NIC teaming supportMoving to DC (older switch architecture) utilised switch independent mode to achieve same outcomeSupport for both options provided flexibility in different environmentsEase of configuration and portability between different switching environments

Kennards HireHyper-V Replica

Allows the publishing of a VM to a DR Hyper-V Server which replicates all changes and keeps the copy in sync.

Allows prior snapshots for fall back to a previous point in time.

Successfully tested and demonstrated Capability missing from our current Hypervisor – costly and messy to work with what we already had. Made DR a tough nut to crack.Next steps for us are move some of our critical VM’s to Hyper-V so we can replicate them to our lab.

Enabler for our DR vision, and will remove complexity/cost in this area.

Kennards HireHyper-V Replica

Learnings:Pilot was run within single AD domain : Set up and workedFor integration with external service provider, there will be other authentication complexities (certificate requirement)Target for replica must be same RCMove paging data to separate VHD

Kennards HireLive Migration

Shared Nothing

Able to do live migrations between Hyper-V servers that share nothing in common. i.e. no cluster, no shared storage

Tested in the Lab across two hosts with no shared storageVery impressive to see in actionDropped maybe two packets, with no visible stoppage on the VM being migrated (watching YouTube)

Over time the “clean” DC architecture gets messy (unbalanced workloads & storage)

Live Migration means we can move VM’s with maximum flexibly going forward. (e.g. difficulty moving VM’s between our two XenServer farms)

Kennards HireLive Migration

Learnings:

3 scenarios:Within clusterWithin local networkAcross the WAN

Need to contemplate performance\bandwidth implications in each case

Kennards HirePowershell

Powershell cmdlets providing direct access to Hyper-V

Our experienceEarly days – but lets us quickly setup VM’s in a repeatable, tested mannerXen was hard to report on with VM lists and settings, simple PowerShell command to extract the VM list with properties.

PowerShell is starting to really help us automate routine tasks – now we have a bit more power to get to Hyper V, build out our IT process via scripts.

# Build out 4 VM’s from a BaseImage.

$VMNames =@(1..4) $BaseImage = "C:\ClusterStorage\Volume1\vCTXBase01.vhd"

Foreach ($VM in $VMNames) {

$VM = "vctx31"+$VM $VMPath = "C:\ClusterStorage\Volume1\Children01\$vm.vhd"New-VHD -ParentPath $BaseImage -Differencing -Path $VMPath New-VM -VHDPath $VMPath -VMName $VM -MemoryStartupBytes 8192MB

-SwitchName "vSwitch"set-VMNetworkAdapterVlan -VMName $VM -Access -vlanid 5Set-VMProcessor -VMName $VM -Count 4

}

Powershell

Kennards HireStorage Options

Loads of storage options with Server 2012SMB 3.0 is a much improved file sharing protocol allowing VM’s and SQL workloads to be run from a UNC pathStorage Spaces – like a mini SAN, cut up cheap raw direct attached storageAlready using it to create working space in our production environmentSimple to use and highly flexible targets ( UNC FileShare, iSCSI target)Plan to leverage SMB3 in our future cluster design

Kennards HireStorage Options

Learnings:Storage capabilities of Server 2012 are extremely useful for virtualisation scenarios where storage volume is an issueTest without SAN6TB storage serversIn production has created storage headroom

Kennards HireProduction Architecture

Hyper-V Replica

WAN 10Mps

Kennards HireServer 2012 Overall Impressions

We used two version of Release Candidates and both felt ready.Installs were clean Performance has been good Provides multiple options for NW, storage, managementHyper-V 3.0 the right choice for our next hypervisor

Next gen hypervisorLeverage our windows skills and knowledge

RDP was great experience technical deep dive provided confidence that our strategy was rightInsight into how big a release Server 2012 is with may optionsLeverage our relationship with Microsoft and Frontline to get into the next generation server OS.

Kennards HireOutcomes

Truly moved into the Dynamic IT delivery modelImproved manageability of entire IT environment via SC 2012Rationalised further to single stack – Microsoft is our Hypervisor platform of choiceProvided ‘ready made’ Cross-DC DR solutionImproved resilience and agility by removing HW reliance (no storage lock -in)Delivered a ‘Cloud Ready’ infrastructure built to scale

Basico Starting Pointo Non-

Homogenous

Standardised

o Microsoft Stacko Move to Data

Centre

Rationalised

o Virtiual DC (Citrix)o System Center

2007

Dynamic

Kennards HireOutcomes

Truly moved into the Dynamic IT delivery modelImproved manageability of entire IT environment via SC 2012Rationalised further to single stack – Microsoft is our Hypervisor platform of choiceProvided ‘ready made’ Cross-DC DR solutionImproved resilience and agility by removing HW reliance (no storage lock -in)Delivered a ‘Cloud Ready’ infrastructure built to scale

Basico Starting Pointo Non-

Homogenous

Standardised

o Microsoft Stacko Move to Data

Centre

Rationalised

o Virtiual DC (Citrix)o System Center

2007

Dynamico Cross-DCo Automated

Failovero Cloud Ready

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