OVH Community, your new community space.

pCC: New strategies of virtualisation


oles@ovh.net
04-03-11, 20:26
Hello,

With the launch of privateCloud in a few days. it will be possible for you to use new virtualization strategies to better exploit physical resources and therefore reduce production costs.

With the pCC, OVH will offer you to set up virtual datacenters. We start a virtual datacenter at £149/month with a pack (consisting of a S host and a NAS), 16 IP for virtual machines (/28) and vSphere access with "basic" licence (free). You can change this datacentre in several ways:
- By adding new hosts
- By adding new NAS
- From 2 hosts, you can upgrade license to "standard", "advance "or "business"
- By adding IP to the network
- From the "standard" license and more, with 2 permanent hosts, you can take the following "per hour" to add resources "as you go."

You can do this or ... create a new datacentre with this new pack (consisting of a host and a NAS). But with the same network. And that changes everything! It means that you'll be able to allocate an IP of your network to the datacentre of your choice. And to see a virtual machine migrating from another host or from a datacentre to another one.

And so you can put the hosts with the maximum of virtual machines without any problems because the day when you do not have enough resources available on a host in your datacentre you will be able to:
- Add a host in your datacentre and, depending on the license, migrate VM from a host to another one, or even with DRS, leave the VMware managing the migrations itself on all your hosts ... VMs are running around on your Cloud without any cut ...
- Create a new datacentre and move your VM from a datacentre to another one. You have to stop the VM copying data from one NAS to another one and restart. And you keep the IP of the VM! The vRack is even better than the IP failover ...

Then again strength the hosts and thus consolidate. Because today, to virtualize, our customers use a dedicated server. The data are stored on local disks. Depending on the type of the sysadmin (bearded or not), the type of virtualizer allows a better or a less good use of physical resources available. In any case, if the dedicated server is down, it's a nightmare. Forget drama with the pCC! Store data on a High availability NAS and depending on your needs, start VM on this or another host. And why not let the VMWare deal with it alone with high availability? Is there still an added value to do this job? This is the real question.

However we often notice that the resources are not exploited. In the best cases 30% max. Either because the virtualization system just allows to cut physical virtually without any possible sharing. Or the sysadmin is scared to start a new virtual machine as it can saturate the resources available on the server and there is drama. The pCC saves you dramas since you can switch, depending on the license, a VM from a datacenter to another one or from one host to another. All this becomes very romantic ... ;-)

The pCC will be accessible in a few clicks and affordable in terms of technical skills. No need to know the Linux code and the patch version to start virtual machines in a few clicks. And therefore, everyone will be able to virtualize tomorrow. The question will therefore arise to know where is the true added value, the one who is offered to the final customer. And therefore focus on this added value that is not necessarily the price ...

It's beautiful but there are some technological limitations. You are limited to one datacentre in version 1.0 of pCC and to 8 datacentres in version 1.1. There is also a limit of 256 hosts per datacentre and 32 NAS per datacentre. 40Gbps bandwidth to Internet for all of your data center.

Regards,

Octave