Virtualization and Private Cloud

NOTE: Please checkout the University Virtualization Users group mailing list: virtualization-users@mailman.stanford.edu
- What is available for the University now (from ITS)?
IT Services provides a central virtualization solution that currently is bundled with systems administration. The SLA for a VM would currently include systems administration.
http://itservices.stanford.edu/strategy/platforms/server-virtualization
http://itservices.stanford.edu/service/virtualserver
http://itservices.stanford.edu/service/virtualservers/support
https://uit.stanford.edu/rates
ITS realizes this is too expensive for most people's use and there are many groups that would use a non-managed (no systems administration included) solution.
- What is going to be available soon from ITS Virtualization?
ITS is going to be providing a "condo" or "container" solution.
- What is on the roadmap for ITS virtualization (and cloud)?
ITS is investigating providing a cloud provisioning tool that might allow the University as a whole to take advantage of any bulk use discount. Initially this might be for compute (research computing) uses.
ITS has "cloud" on our strategic vision. This would include private cloud for general use systems and for research computing.
- General Q&A
Q: Why do people run their own virtualization environments? (Why don't you use ITS virtualization?)
A: Some clusters need big data, faster disk, specific tailored storage for Oracle (or other app?), costs are far too expensive, data type (restricted), and of course flexibility and control.
Q: Why is ITS provided virtualization so expensive?
A: The virtualization instance is managed currently (includes systems administration) which makes the cost higher. In the future, ITS will offer a non-managed ("condo" or "container") which will meet more of the University's needs. The goal will be to drive the costs down. Additionally, because ITS virtualization must recover costs, ITS tracked all the time and resources involved (storage, sysadmin time, hardware, datacenter space, etc, etc). Most groups that use virtualization do not have to fully account or recover their costs so some of the actual costs are not realized.
Q: What is the current usage of the ITS environment?
A: Non-restricted is ~150 VMs, restricted is ~15.
Q: Please describe the ITS restricted data virtualization environment. Why is it so expensive? Is it efficient?
A: ITS runs two restricted data virtual environments (in addition to non-restricted) - restricted dev/test and restricted production. Neither environment handles DB servers yet - at the moment that would require a separate hypervisor environment for dev/test and prod. Runnning these two are not particularly efficient because of the security requirements, the overhead costs, and current underutilization.
- Additional Links
Most virtualization deployments are VMware currently. Alternates are used because they are less expensive and protect against vendor lock-in with using VMware.
VPC is a possibility with Amazon for some users.
Rapid deployment is very important to the current Virtualization solution as an absolute requirement for cloud (private and public).
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