Little Miss Enviro Geek : Virtualization

Some personal news...

biwirth — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 03:24:00 GMT

Hello Dear Blog Readers,

(hmmm....that kinda sounds like the beginning of one of those SPAM emails)

I wanted to let you all know I am moving on from Microsoft and shall no longer be blogging here. I'll be moving an archive of these posts to my website http://www.greenitstrategy.com and shall continue blogging there on Green IT.

So what will I be doing now?

Well, I have decided to take some time off, write a book and maybe look into starting my own business. Regardless, you can always catch me through my website and please do feel free to visit me there.

Thank you to everyone who contacted me with their Green IT questions over the past two years and gave me feedback. I really appreciate your support and good luck with your own Green IT initiatives.

Kind Regards,

Bianca AKA Little Miss Enviro Geek

TechEd: Virtualization for Sustainable Computing

biwirth — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:56:00 GMT

Yesterday I presented at TechEd Australia on Virtualization for Sustainable Computing where I took everyone who attended through the six building blocks of building a virtualized environment:

Saving Power
Eliminating Waste
Managing for High Utilisation
Power sizing Hardware
Power sizing Software
Managing for Efficiency

One of the areas I talked about that I haven't mentioned here before was the real-life example of Microsoft IT virtualizing SQL and saving a tonne of rack space, power and money by doing so. Below are two of my slides from the presentation summarising the consolidation Microsoft IT achieved within their environment:

Check out the full whitepaper here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd393309.aspx

Also some of the other resources I used in my presentation:

Harnessing the Power of Virtualization for Dynamic IT - http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/execmail/2008/01-21virtualization.mspx
Virtualization: Power, Service-Interface Compatibility, and Design - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms998259.aspx
Virtualization: Fuelling Green Data Centres - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd347164.aspx
Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit for Energy Efficient Computing - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/solutionaccelerators/dd537569.aspx
Planning Your Power Management and Virtualization Strategies - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.gr.powermanagement.aspx?pr=blog

* Microsoft Exchange: Physical Vs Virtual Power Utilisation *

biwirth — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 20:37:00 GMT

There is a great whitepaper on TechNet comparing the power utilisation of native and virtual Exchange environments. With the recent announcement that virtualisation is fully supported for Microsoft Exchange, I know many customers that are considering it and some that were desperately awaiting it!

The whitepaper is called "Comparing the Power Utilization of Native and Virtual Exchange Environments" and it outlines a test methodology and power utilisation results for physical versus virtual Exchange environments.

Here is a snapshot of the results in WATTS:

This shows that the reduction of 8 physical servers to 2 physical servers (with a constant 32 processors) resulted in an overall 50% reduction in power consumption equalling around 8,582 kWh/year. This is equivalent to 6.2 tonnes of carbon emissions per year, equalling the carbon sequestered by around 1.4 acres of pine forest or CO2 emissions from 257 propane cylinders from your backyard barbie.

NB: This excludes storage, cooling and processor core consolidation.

There is some great data in this whitepaper - I highly recommend reading it if you are implementing Exchange and tossing up virtual Vs physical; or if you are looking for further power and cost optimisation opportunities.

On a slightly different but related topic, I was recently asked by a customer about using VMotion for HA/DR. If you are considering using VMWare VMotion, this is not yet a supported scenario. From the lips of our Messaging & UC expert here in Oz, Johann Kruse, below is a quick overview of the considerations for this particular area:

"We fully support VMWare as the virtualisation platform, but VMotion is not supported for Exchange Servers. If they do experience issues during a failover or outage, PSS/Premier would not be able to assist.

[As well as SCR] we recommend also using CCR for availability within primary site as it is fully application aware..VMotion is not application-aware, and using it can have unintended and unexpected consequences for a server application that maintains state data, such as Exchange.

There is a whitepaper from the product titled Microsoft Support Policies and Recommendations for Exchange Servers in Hardware Virtualization Environments at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc794548.aspx which I recommend.

Here is a comparison of CCR vs VMotion for availability....

	*Virtual machine migration*	*Cluster continuous replication*
Operating system heartbeat detection	Yes	Yes
Exchange server heartbeat detection	No	Yes
Copies of Exchange data	1	2
Requires shared storage	Yes	No
Supports Exchange-aware backup from passive node	No	Yes

TechEd 2009 US announces Green IT Track - first ever!

biwirth — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 03:01:48 GMT

For my fellow green geeks in the US, Microsoft have announced their first ever Green IT track for TechEd 2009. Nice! There are 9 sessions specifically on Green IT, including:

ARC313 - Understanding environmental compliance, policy and regulation for IT Leaders - I have seen a version of this internally and I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to understand a bit more around how environmental management is achieved with technology.
ISB206 - What's Behind the Cloud: Microsoft's Data Center Transformation - Christian is one of the key people working with The Green Grid from Microsoft on Data Centres.
MGT201 - Microsoft System Center for the Datacenter
VIR206 - Virtualization for Sustainable Computing
WSV203 - Saving Power and Reducing Environmental Impact with Windows Server
WSV309 - Enhanced Power Efficiency and Power Management Capabilities in Windows Server 2008 R2 - this one should be very informative. Stephen Berard is THE man for power management in Microsoft.

To register and to check out the full list and session descriptions, click yourself into HERE.

TechNet Special Online Edition: "Going Green"

biwirth — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 23:57:00 GMT

A quick post today: TechNet Magazine has published a special online-only edition on Green IT. Topics include:

* Green IT Webcasts in April & May *

biwirth — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 02:35:24 GMT

Check out these Green IT Webcasts happening over April and May with some of Microsoft's best Green IT speakers including Christian Belady, Daniel Costello, Dan Reed, Jim Larus, Isaac Roybal, Adam Bogobowicz, and Stephen Berard.

Title	Date	Time	URL
Manager Webcast Series - Green IT	4/29/2009	4:00 PM GMT	http://bit.ly/8bX4N
Transforming the Data Center with Energy Efficiency (Level 200)	5/1/2009	11:00 AM PST	http://bit.ly/12CFzf
Hyper-Green Virtualization: Scaling Enterprise IT for Energy Efficiency (Level 200)	5/5/2009	10:00 AM PST	http://bit.ly/TFwxV
Cloud Computing Futures: Creating Greener Clouds with Microsoft Research (Level 200)	5/6/2009	9:00 AM PST	http://bit.ly/18hsgU
Improving Energy Efficiency w/ Windows 7 Power Management (Level 200)	5/8/2009	10:00 AM PST	http://bit.ly/fplU

Also, one webcast from Microsoft IT already been hosted & the live recording can be found here:

Title	Date	Time	URL
How Microsoft Does IT: Improving the Sustainability and Use of SQL Server at Microsoft (Level 300)	4/21/2009	Completed	http://bit.ly/2Mp0MS

HOW TO: Green IT & Visio: Monitoring HVAC & Virtualisation with data connections

biwirth — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:41:00 GMT

So I am pretty sure we all use Visio to do our network diagrams & map out of architecture, however I recently found out about how Visio can be used to map out Green IT initiatives. The Visio Toolbox site has all the goodies for Visio. There are two particularly helpful tools in relation to Green IT specifically:

Rack Server Virtualization - this is an add-in you can download for free. There is a good PDF as well explaining How to analyse Rack Server Virtualization.
HVAC Monitoring with Visio - using a partner HVAC tool, you can setup monitoring inside Visio. For instructions on this DOWNLOAD the PDF.

Linking Data with Visio

The key to start using these tools are to know how to link data to a Visio diagram (you need Visio Professional for this functionality):

For developers, check out this MSDN article on how to do this both programmatically: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb743267.aspx
For IT Pros, open Visio, press F1 (Help), then search for "Create a detailed network diagram by using external data in Visio Professional"

Rack Server Virtualization: A planning scenario tool

Some key points on this add-in are:

Identify the candidates for virtualisation from a rack & server view
You can source data on elements like usage-over-time CPU utilisation direct from System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) or WMI to get current CPU utilisation (snapshot in time only)
Before & After visual analysis
Ability to export your report afterwards

For more Visio Green IT resources, go to: http://visiotoolbox.com/en-US/visio_greenit.aspx