As you recall from previous weeks, VMs are quite a handy tool to reduce equipment costs for your company’s infrastructure. As it happens, clusters can be created in your network that employ VMs.

1. How would you maintain network health if you have an infrastructure configured with VMs and clusters?
2. How would you use PowerShell to accomplish this?

Flesh out your thoughts and interact with your classmates. Post your initial response by Wednesday each week and then return on a couple of other days to see what’s going on with the discussions. The more you interact, the more you learn from your peers, and the more you share with them about what you know. You’ll also be showing your instructor what you’ve picked up.

Answer 2 classmates

Jason Harris

Class, The first thing that would have to be addressed is detection. Regardless if there is an automatic remediation technique, administrators just be made aware of the enterprise’s network status as quickly as possible. As an instructor once stated, “if it cannot be detected then it cannot be measured; if it cannot be measured then it may as well not exist.”

There are multiple methods to monitor a network. The most popular is through a SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) program that automatically pings all devices at a preset interval. This one of the quickest methods to track all devices on the network. There are also Cisco’s SD Access’s VManage software that can be used to manage both physical and virtual network architecture. VManage provides a centralized GUI for managing all network devices while providing highly customizable methods of security. It is what network management most likely will look like in the future.

When it comes to VM and clusters there are similar methods to detect issues. I have mostly seen the Windows proprietary programs being used to view overall virtual network health but there are Virtual SNMP software that can be used as well. Maintaining network health is a different story. Fortunately, many virtual problems can be solved by simply restarting the VM. To maintain uptime, normally a subsidiary or secondary server will run to allow load balancing and/or provide repudiation (failover clusters). These methods along with an interim backup technique solve a large amount of problems for networks as long as the underlying physical equipment continues to run properly. The Windows OS allows all of these methods to be implemented through powershell (due to command line being to preferred method of configuration for windows systems).

Alfred Cianfrani

VMs and VMs in Clusters have lots of benefits and options for your network. The ability for hosts to live migrate when issues arise such as a simple network disconnect is just one automation benefits of many. Cache allocation, VM drain on shutdown, shared virtual disks, resilency, dynamic witness, node splits are many extra benefits using Hyper-V or VMWares version as well. Cluster node health detection increases your resiliency for VMs in a cluster. When I used to run the hardware in a data center back when Windows Server 2003 was the hot ticket, VMWare was barely a startup. All of our servers in the data center were independent physical machines. Some of ours were clustered, like the SQL databases, the AD nodes, the Domain Controllers and a few other core servers that maintain the operational network. Everything was clustered for redundancy with multiple NICs, multiple hard drives, multiple processors, just about everything you could think of had an extra physical attachment to it that drew power. My experience is limited with Microsoft Hyper-V but when the first 2 versions of VMware came out we were tasked to implement this into our infrastructure. We started replacing the antique servers with HP Blade systems, this was probably 10-12 years ago. Still they were the hottest servers on the market at the time. 128GB of Ram when Server 2008HPC just came out was unheard of…Our SQL db had about 4 GB of Ram and that was considered good at the time. Anyway, we integrated version 1.0 and 2.0 VMware after the beta into our infrastructure and immediately saw only incredible benefits. Automation, fail over switching, reduced carbon footprint, shared and pooled resources, increased network speeds, less downtime all around. The console monitored the network health. We ran scripts through powershell to force the GPO policy updates and server settings and to install and create new VMs and start services for the different servers we built, like IIS, Web, AD,Radius and such. When Server 2008 came out we were in VMWare 2.0 if I recall correctly. I know this is a Windows class, I am just trying to show the correlation, as Hyper-V and VMWare are pretty much alike in almost every way down to the core kernel. If you understand all the commands through Powershell, you really can control all aspects of a virtual datacenter with ease. Thats where I am trying to excel. I have seen it done that way , but I am one of those point and click the interface option people since both ways work.