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Offering standby VMs – without undue ‘just-in-case’ costs?

Asked by Dave S.,Tel-Aviv, Israel - October 30, 2009

I am the storage manager and virtualization specialist in a large military installation running a few data centers with SLAs. One of my SLAs requires me to guarantee standby virtual machines that can be fired up in a matter of minutes. Before a VM can be booted, it needs to be provisioned. Provisioning a VM implies a VHD file copy and that can take hours. With Windows Server 2008 R2 and its Clustered Shared Volumes, the recommended best practice is to locate multiple VHDs (and VMs) per CSV. Mirroring/cloning capable hardware operates at the volume/LUN level and not file level, so high-end storage hardware wastes the mirror/clone space for the other VHDs if I use that feature and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 (SCVMM) Rapid Provisioning. So at the moment, I am pre-provisioning multiple virtualization hosts with multiple VMs and the SLA is met, but at the cost of wasting a lot of resources “just in case” and the virtualization host for a cold standby is pre-chosen, implying it is not necessarily the best choice when the need arises. Is there an alternative?  I need a solution to provide this SLA

Topics: Cloud Computing , Infrastructure Management , Virtualization

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  • Hi Dave,
    Did you look at www.VMUtil.com?
    The user guide, evaluator guide etc are all posted there. And also the signed software
    To alleviate SCVMM pain, you can use VHDCopy.exe to checkout the VM
    If you have a 60GB VHD file with 40GB free, VHD copy will avoid reading the 40GB and sending it across the network. By default, it will also not write the 40GB. With the /Secure option, it will write 40GBs of zeros, but the read and the xmission of the 40Gbs is still avoided.
    Hope this helped.

    Daniel
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