vdi whitepaper egenera fujitsu 712

7/31/2019 VDI Whitepaper Egenera Fujitsu 712

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Highly Available, Cost Effectiveand Scalable InfrastructurePlatforms for Virtual DesktopInfrastructure with Egenera PANManager Software.PAN Manager Software for Fujitsu PRIMERGY BX900


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Page 1Copyright Egenera 2011. All rights reserved

Section 1 Executive Summary

1.1 Egenera Inc.

Egenera pioneered Converged Infrastructure (CI) with its PAN Manager Software in 2001,and has implemented over 1,600 installations globally. PAN Manager simplifies data centerinfrastructure and management by leveraging commodity off the shelf hardware componentsto create a pool of infrastructure that can be quickly and easily re-allocated to both baremetal and virtualized workloads, providing the ideal platform for delivering cloud basedservices, large scale Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployments, along with otherbusiness and mission critical enterprise applications that demand a flexible and highly-available computing platform such as SAP or Oracle.

1.2 About this Document

This document takes a closer look at one of those solution areas, VDI, and demonstrateswhy PAN Manager Software provides the ideal platform for delivering flexible and highlyavailable computing resources for scalable, enterprise-class virtual desktop deployments.

Section 2 About the Egenera Solution

PAN Manager Software delivers and manages converged infrastructure, which means itcreates and manages pools of computing, I/O, networking and storage resources, enabling a

highly agile and flexible architecture that can be rapid provisioned and used to automaticallyprotect key IT services, regardless of the operating environment.

By virtualizing I/O and networking, this approach eliminates many costly I/O, cabling andnetworking components, while simplifying server re-configuration, availability, and disasterrecovery serviceseven when no hypervisor is present. Egeneras unique approach isenabled by technologies including virtualized I/O, converged fabric networking and virtualswitching. Egenera holds a number of patents in these and other areas. PAN Manager isused by IT operations professionals, offering proven, easy-to-use solutions that provide

Business-critical availability for enterprise applications and environments

HA and DR for mixed physical and hypervisor based environments

Rapid provisioning for both single servers and entire environments Elastic Infrastructure-as-a-Service foundations for cloud-computing

Simpler to install and use than traditional management, clustering and DR tools, PANManager is more reliable and typically reduces TCO substantially over alternatives. Egeneracustomers benefit from fewer physical I/O and networking components, and have simplifiedtheir IT operations by as much as 95% compared to traditional point-products.


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Section 4 Why PAN Manager Provides the Ideal Platform for VDI

So lets look at the integrated features of PAN Manager Software and how those capabilitiescan be leveraged to build an enterprise class infrastructure for virtual desktops.

4.1 Rapidly Deploy Servers

The first feature we are going to take a look at is the ability to rapidly provision resources asand when required, depending on business requirements. To create a new server definitionit takes just four mouse clicks!

Click 1:Select the primary blade serveron which to run the operating system.

Click 2:Attach the disk to the serverupon which the image resides or whereyou will build the operating systemimage.

Click 3:Connect the server to anetwork, either private or public

Click 4: Boot the server. Whilebooting, you can connect a serial, textor graphic console.

This process could be automated to add additional resources on demand, which could thenbe provisioned as hypervisor hosts for virtual desktops or additional management servers.

4.2 Single Pane of Glass Management Console

A key advantage of any solution is its ability to provide system administrators with anintuitive, simple yet flexible management interface. As you can see in the above section, thePAN Manager interface is simple to use and makes management tasks straightforward anderror free. For those that require more advanced features and integration, there is acomprehensive command line available.

Where PAN Manager really excels is in its ability to manage resources (I/O, CPU andmemory), HA and DR for both physical and hypervisor-based environments all from thesame management console and using the same management software PAN Manager.

4.3 Delivering One Click High Availability

In a virtualized desktop environment protecting against failure now becomes a criticalrequirement. In a traditional desktop environment, if a users desktop failed it only affectedthem. Now you are hosting 100s of desktops on a single server. If that server were to failthen 100s of users would be affected. To protect against a failure of one of the blade

servers, typically you would deploy some form of clustering software. By deploying a PANManager converged infrastructure solution, there is no need for expensive clusteringsoftware and you can set up HA in a single click in the GUI.


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PAN Manager enables high availability for all operating environments by freeing theseenvironments from the underlying data center. This is true for both physical and virtualenvironments.

By using one or more high availability or standby blades (and the PAN Server Portabilityplug-in to PAN Manager), in the event that one of the blade servers within the chassis fails,then an HA blade can assume the I/O and networking configuration of the original blade,boot the failed servers operating system (physical or virtual) and take on that workload.

A key feature in theflexibility of PAN highavailability is that the HAblade does not need to bethe same specification as

the one that failed. Youare also not limited to oneHA blade. You canconfigure as many as youlike or create a pool ofspare compute resource

4.4 Delivering Verifiable One Click Disaster Recovery

In addition to providing high availability, now that users desktops are being hosted on serverinfrastructure in the data center, disaster recovery for the desktop user community now alsobecomes a business critical consideration. What if the primary data center were to fail or go

offline due to a communications failure, fire or flood? How would you be able to serviceusers?

PAN Manager Software deploys an N+1(over-subscription model), verifiable and One Clickdisaster recovery solution. This gives you the ability to set up DR services in literally oneclick and fail them over from one or more enclosures or PAN Domains to another whichcould be located on a completely different site or co-location. It is N+1 disaster recovery asthe secondary site will still be configured with a high availability blade in the event of a bladeserver failure within the enclosure on the secondary site.

Verifiable refers to theability to quickly test and

verify system operabilitygiven the flexible approachto the infrastructure infreeing applications fromthe underlying hardwaresuch as I/O, storage andnetworking.

This means you can testDR will run without havingto actually invoke it,meaning you will have100% confidence in theevent of a real DR event.


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4.5 Flexible Workload Deployment and Dynamic Repurposing

Abstracting the physical infrastructure from the operating systems allow these operatingsystems or workloads, whether they are physical or hypervisor based, to become completelyflexible and portable, meaning that they can easily be moved from one blade server toanother instantly or in the case of disaster recovery to a blade in a different chassis in adifferent location.

A key advantage point in doing this is that the hardware does not need to be exactly thesame. The blade you are moving to could have different processors and different memoryconfigurations. It also means that with PAN Manager software you can potentially be usedfor different tasks at different times of the day and night.

Another other key advantage in this feature is in taking a shared infrastructure approach.

By this we mean using a secondary or disaster recovery site for things like testing anddeveloping. As workloads can be repurposed instantaneously should the need to invoke DRbecome necessary, then we can suspend the test environment and load a new configurationin minutes. For customers this means significant cost savings in that instead of having topurchase three sets of hardware for production, test and DR, they would only need twosets as test and DR would effectively be sharing the same set of hardware. This may alsomean that a customer would have a test environment that previously they may not have had.

When it comes to a desktop virtualization solution, the ability to repurpose serversdynamically and remotely with just a few mouse clicks is a major benefit. The majority of theservers within this environment are used to host the users virtual desktops. In the case ofthis reference architecture, fourteen out of the eighteen servers in the chassis are used for

this purpose.

If you think about when these virtual desktops are utilized the most, its going to be duringnormal office hours (9-5 for example). Outside of those normal hours the servers will havevery low utilisation rates. With the PAN System, you could repurpose some of those bladeservers, leaving a few core servers to cover a much smaller number of users who may workout of office hours. The repurposed servers could be used for testing purposes or to run outof hours backups or batch processing that would work much quicker if it had more resource.

4.6 Administration Management and Secure Boundaries

Logical Environment Definition (Facilitating multi-tenancy). PAN Manager Software includesa feature called LPANs (Logical Processing Area Network).

This allows the PAN resources to be grouped together e.g.for one particular application or for administration purposeswhere each LPAN has a different set of roles andresponsibilities for different administrators. They can alsobe connected to different networks and storage pools.

Each one is isolated from other LPANs/blades serverseven if they are in the same enclosure.

In a VDI environment you could create LPANs for eachdepartments hosted desktops as well as the infrastructure.


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Section 5 Building an Open Architecture with PAN Manager Software

By deploying a VDI solution based on PAN Manager Software, you will benefit from asolution that is easy to deploy and manage - encompassing both physical and virtualenvironments, whilst enabling a flexible infrastructure, reduced complexity and delivering ahighly available and resilient platform.

The Egenera approach is to provide customers with an open infrastructure solution forbuilding their VDI infrastructure which integrates high availability feature as standard. Thepicture above shows an open approach to deploying hosted virtual desktops.

5.1 Egenera PAN Manager Software Licensing

PAN Manager Software is provided in three simple licenses, on a license per blade model. The PAN Builder license provides the foundation services for rapid deployment

Server Portability adds HA to those blades that you want to protect locally

Finally if you need DR, then add the PAN Portability licenses as required

Section 6 An Example VDI Deployment

As one is the largest healthcare system in the southeast of the United States had over10,000 PCs deployed across a substantial geographic area. As a means to streamline thedelivery of client services, this large organization wanted to move to a VDI environment. Itwas hoped that the migration to VDI would lower the total costs of client computing services

by at least 50%.


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At the same time, the organization was experiencing explosive growth in personnel as itexpanded services and providers. As such, the organization also needed a client computingsolution that would allow them to quickly provision new users, remotely manage clientservices, be responsive to end users request and do that without adding headcount to the ITteam. As such they began the search for an infrastructure management platform that couldmeet their needs.

Finally, the organization required the ability to rapid provisioning infrastructure, full processautomation including unattended HA and self-healing of resource pools and a system thatfacilitates compliance with industry regulators such as HIPPA. Ideally all of these needswould be delivered from a platform that that could be managed via a single UI. Ultimately,the team chose deploy PAN Manager together with XenDesktop from Citrix.

The benefits of a PAN Manger in a VDI environment were immediate.

The IT staff immediately recognized a 15:1 reduction in physical server count

Massive reductions in facilities costs

Decrease in the time to deliver application updates from weeks to hours

From an end users point of view, users saw:

Increased mobility as they roamed between sites and across devices

Improved access to the information

Enhanced reliability over traditional PCs

Best of all from the organization perspective was that the entire 10,000 user VDI

infrastructure can managed by one engineer as subset of their responsibilities helpingthem exceed the 50% total costs reduction goal laid out before the project began

Section 7 Egenera Software with Fujitsu Hardware

Egenera have been working closely with Fujitsu since 2005 when Fujitsu and Egeneraentered into an OEM agreement for Fujitsu to sell the BladeFrame technology. Recognizingthe advances in blade server hardware technology, in 2010 PAN Manager Software wasported to run on the Fujitsu PRIMERGY BX900 server platform.

The combination of Egenera PAN Manager Software for delivering converged infrastructurewith HA and DR and the Fujitsu PRIMERGY BX900 provides customers with manageableand highly automated high density server resources that are an ideal solution for deliveringenterprise class virtual desktop environments.

7.1 Fujitsu PRIMERGY BX900

The PRIMERGY BX900 is a complete Dynamic Server Infrastructure in a single bladeenclosure. This blade server can be dynamically adapted to different IT requirements,thereby reducing costs while increasing your IT agility.

The PRIMERGY BX900 with latest Intel Xeon processorequipped systems can accommodate up to 18 server


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blades in a single 10U blade enclosure. Configured with the latest Intel VirtualizationTechnology, very large memory capacities and state-of-the-art I/O performance, thePRIMERGY BX900 is optimized for any virtualization scenario. Its density and stackingability enable flexible scaling to ensure complete investment protection. To give you anexample of the compute power, a single 10U enclosure can contain up to 216 processorcores and 3.5TB of memory perfect for any desktop virtualization environment.

As well as delivering on compute resources, the PRIMERGY BX900 also delivers with itsenvironmental credentials. Using Cool -safe, a trademarked Fujitsu cooling concept,combined with power supplies with 90% efficiency and the embedded ServerView Powermanagement software, it ensures truly dynamic power and cooling capabilities that save youmoney.

Section 8 In Summary

Egenera has been delivering PAN Manager based solutions to customers for over a decade.More recently customers are turning to PAN to manage their VDI environments and deliver areliable and protected infrastructure what is increasingly becoming a critical businessworkload

PAN Manager continues to be the only open converged infrastructure management solutionon the market. In addition the platform leads the way in delivery value added services likeintegrated high availability and disaster recovery. It is these features, in combination with thesingle integrated user interface that makes the product such a compelling and ideal platform

companion for delivering enterprise class VDI environments.

Section 9 The Next Steps

Egenera has published a comprehensive reference architecture white paper for deployingVDI solutions using PAN Manager Software. This white paper describes in detail the sizingrequirements for building a scalable solution using a building block approach.

http://www.egenera.com/wplp/Reference-Architecture-PAN-Manager-for-VDI-on-Fujitsu.html

To learn more about PAN Manager software please contact the Egenera Team at:

Email: [email protected]

Web: www.egenera.com

Phone: 978-206-6300

Egenera Inc., 80 Central Street, Boxborough, MA 01719

Copyright 2012 Egenera Inc.

All rights reserved . Egenera, Egenera stylized logos and PAN Manager are trademarks or registered trademarks

of Egenera, Inc. All other company and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their

respective holders. The information in this document is subject to change without notice. 712

vdi whitepaper egenera fujitsu 712

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