I would like to thank Henk Bokhoven from http://bok.xs4all.nl/weblog/ who has kindly sent me through a link from the oracke wiki about an enterprise virtualization environment with oracle vm server. I ahve just posted the summary below as it is quite a long article.
Article Summary
I have been involed in a project to migrate a set of old/legacy systems to VMs running on many less physical systems. This is the classical justification for virtualization.
While deploying the VM-based infrastructure, I found that there was very little documentation across all current VM vendors that discussed the integration of VM host systems in “enterprise” environments. This page is an attempt to rectify this. Note that just like “International Community”, there is no real agreement as to what “enterprise” means.
For the purposes of this wiki entry, I define my Enterprise virtualization environment as being one where preferably:
- there is no single point of failure, making services resilient against individual component downtime due to failures, upgrades, servicing and the like
- systems reside on many seperate networks/subnets, normally divided by functional requirements and the security profiles related to these requirements.
- storage is centralized onto a SAN, with a high availability (read 2+ paths) interconnect that provides block storage. I will discuss FCP, but iSCSI is also possible.
So we naturally would prefer to have all of the above, but factors such as time/budget/capability will probably mean that a business’ computing infrastructure relies on some non-ideal configurations. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as long as the risks of doing so are known and acceptable to the business.
Get the full article here – I may post the full article on my site later.