SCCM 2007 & VMWare Discussion (Full Version)

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mosquat -> SCCM 2007 & VMWare Discussion (3/31/2008 11:28:24 AM)

Hello all,

I know it's not "officially" supported by Microsoft I wondered if anyone is using VMWare ESX as a platform for SCCM 2007 successfully??

We are looking to move to SCCM and I just wanted to know (from others experiences) if it's better to go the physical or virtual route...my preference is physical but my managers may take convincing!

Thanks

Mosquat



rtruss -> RE: SCCM 2007 & VMWare Discussion (3/31/2008 11:30:23 AM)

We have several of our child sites running on the VMware free server with no issues at all.  Essentially ESX and free use the same image file and vmware tools so I would have to say there should be no issues with it in ESX.



jdavis375 -> RE: SCCM 2007 & VMWare Discussion (3/31/2008 11:34:48 AM)

We are using VMWare ESX in my environment without problems. Just be careful how you set up the disk configuration because of how HD intensive SCCM can be. Some of your physical or virtual decision could also boil down to how much RAM are you going to allocate to the VM.



MhermanNBME -> RE: SCCM 2007 & VMWare Discussion (3/31/2008 4:56:21 PM)

We are currently running it in production with ESX with out any problems (at least vmware related...)



mosquat -> RE: SCCM 2007 & VMWare Discussion (4/1/2008 3:39:12 AM)

Thanks for your responses - I just wondered (especially with your configuration rtruss) if your parent site is a physical and only your child sites are virtual??

I think that here we will have one parent site only to begin with and will then add internet based site which I expect (based on everyone's response) that this system can and will be virtual.

Thanks  again

Mos



cmonfet -> RE: SCCM 2007 & VMWare Discussion (4/1/2008 6:33:57 AM)

we are running our production SCCM server that services approx 5500 clients on ESX without a problem.  we have allocated 3gb RAM, 2vCPUs and all disks are running on our SAN. 



rtruss -> RE: SCCM 2007 & VMWare Discussion (4/1/2008 1:46:39 PM)

Currently our parent site is physical and some of our child sites are VM's.  Not all sites are running in a virtual environment yet.  We began to piggy back on our backup domain controllers when we strted to update our remote sites to 2003 AD.



thedave1164 -> RE: SCCM 2007 & VMWare Discussion (4/11/2008 8:35:36 AM)

We are running SCCM 2007 on a VMware ESX with no issues, single server 2gb ram 1 processor. Same server is running WSUS and SQL 2005 std. <600 clients across 45 remote sites.



jnelson993 -> RE: SCCM 2007 & VMWare Discussion (4/11/2008 12:14:22 PM)

So, anyone tried any LARGE implementations going on VMWare yet?  I mean, <600 clients...I have more chunks of corn in my crap than that :)



rjarrett -> RE: SCCM 2007 & VMWare Discussion (4/15/2008 10:35:02 PM)

Your post reflects poorly on Wells Fargo.   

TheDave may have <600 clients, but they are scattered over 45 sites.  That alone could induce problems that CMonfet's 5500 clients on a high speed LAN might not have.  Imagine those 5500 clients dispersed over 11 secondaries and it wouldn't look much different than TheDave's clients on one site server.  Problems come in many forms and he was simply offering feedback to someone who solicited it.



jnelson993 -> RE: SCCM 2007 & VMWare Discussion (4/16/2008 11:58:42 AM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: rjarrett

Your post reflects poorly on Wells Fargo.   

TheDave may have <600 clients, but they are scattered over 45 sites.  That alone could induce problems that CMonfet's 5500 clients on a high speed LAN might not have.  Imagine those 5500 clients dispersed over 11 secondaries and it wouldn't look much different than TheDave's clients on one site server.  Problems come in many forms and he was simply offering feedback to someone who solicited it.


C'mon now, let's all take a breath. No need to be offended. I'll be the first to admit that my posts don't represent Wells Fargo, they are my own.  I only include Wells Fargo in my signature to let people know where I've been kickin' it lately, not to represent them in any way.  It's just that it can help put someone's responses in context; if someone from Microsoft, Target, the D.O.D. or Wells Fargo, etc. posts, you kinda know what scale they're talking about. 

I'm sorry if I've offended anyone with the corn thing, but I've used it before in these same forums and we had some good laughs so now it's kind of an inside joke around here that's not really for insiders anymore.  I didn't take this crowd as the type with skin that thin, but I'll try to keep things above board.

Anyway, my post wasn't intended to take away from the fact that 600 clients over 45 sites might be more to think about than 5500 clients on a high-speed LAN, but in the grand scheme of things, I think we can agree there's a massive difference between 600 clients with 45 sites and 200K clients with 10K remote sites.  If someone says they've got VMWare working just fine in the former environment, it does not mean it will work in the latter. I certainly don't mean to diminish the importance of 600 or 5500 client sites, I've done that work and I'm sure you work a million hours a week just like we do here, what I was trying to ask (apparently poorly) was if there are any large (> 50K?) implementations using VMs for any site systems yet and how that's going.



rjarrett -> SCCM 2007 & VMWare Discussion (4/16/2008 1:34:17 PM)

I'm cool with your intent.  I was not trying to be thin skinned, but rather point out that TheDave and CMonfet were the only ones to give any idea of the scope and scale of their implementations.  As I read your comments, I could not help feeling it is hard enough to get people to offer up information as it is.  The last thing we need is to run off new guys (TheDave has 6 posts) because they feel like their input isn't "worthy" of consideration.  This product is sufficiently problematic that every insight could help.

In any case, I agree it would be nice to find that large scale user that could tell us how well their VM implementation is working.



jnelson993 -> RE: SCCM 2007 & VMWare Discussion (4/16/2008 1:52:02 PM)

That's cool.  I totally see your point.  One of my big intents in all of the forum posts I have and the articles I've been writing is to help just those sorts of people out, like some people did with me when I was in their shoes.  And if I'm actually having the opposite effect, or making them want to clam up then I welcome the feedback and will make sure I watch that blind spot.  After all, if they've got things working on up to 5500 users or 45 sites, then there are tons of shops who fall into that size range and should feel confident about giving VM a try.  I certainly don't want that point to get lost.

I appreciate your input.



thedave1164 -> RE: SCCM 2007 & VMWare Discussion (4/17/2008 3:41:13 PM)

Man, am I offended![:@]

Not really, but we do have a some what complex system of VPN's for our size environment.

I worked at a large pharma, >100K seats, but they will not even think about SCCM 2007 for another year or more.

I can tell you that SCCM 2007/Server 2008/VMware ESX does not work [;)]

I know where John N is coming from and wish I could answer his question. But from the performance I am seeing with my system, I do not see why it would not work just fine as long as the VM was built with the larger scale in mind.

That said, I would probably want to have seperate systems for the WSUS and SQL.



cpellis -> RE: SCCM 2007 & VMWare Discussion (4/21/2008 2:31:21 PM)

There is no obvious reason VMware and SCCM on a primary or secondary would not work. The question comes down to support from MS if you have an issue.

You may want to consider a solution such as Platespin, which delivers anything to anything with VMware (v2v,v2p,p2p,p2v). In the event of a problem, you move your virtual SCCM server to a physical server, to obtain support.

This is from personal experience 2 years ago :)



bmason505 -> RE: SCCM 2007 & VMWare Discussion (4/22/2008 10:18:12 AM)

I'd still be interested in knowing what's the largest client count anyone has pulled off for a primary with any VM solution.



mserafine -> RE: SCCM 2007 & VMWare Discussion (4/22/2008 10:55:51 AM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: thedave1164

Man, am I offended![:@]

Not really, but we do have a some what complex system of VPN's for our size environment.

I worked at a large pharma, >100K seats, but they will not even think about SCCM 2007 for another year or more.

I can tell you that SCCM 2007/Server 2008/VMware ESX does not work [;)]

I know where John N is coming from and wish I could answer his question. But from the performance I am seeing with my system, I do not see why it would not work just fine as long as the VM was built with the larger scale in mind.

That said, I would probably want to have seperate systems for the WSUS and SQL.


Although I'm a little biased, if you're going to be running Server 2008, then I suggest you use Hyper-V and not even bother with VMWare. However, I should also add that SCCM isn't supported on Server 2008 until SCCM SP1 is released.



thedave1164 -> RE: SCCM 2007 & VMWare Discussion (4/23/2008 10:20:52 AM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: mserafine

quote:

ORIGINAL: thedave1164

Man, am I offended![:@]

Not really, but we do have a some what complex system of VPN's for our size environment.

I worked at a large pharma, >100K seats, but they will not even think about SCCM 2007 for another year or more.

I can tell you that SCCM 2007/Server 2008/VMware ESX does not work [;)]

I know where John N is coming from and wish I could answer his question. But from the performance I am seeing with my system, I do not see why it would not work just fine as long as the VM was built with the larger scale in mind.

That said, I would probably want to have seperate systems for the WSUS and SQL.


Although I'm a little biased, if you're going to be running Server 2008, then I suggest you use Hyper-V and not even bother with VMWare. However, I should also add that SCCM isn't supported on Server 2008 until SCCM SP1 is released.


LOL

Yeah, after a long couple of weeks trying to troubleshoot my SCCM installation, and dealing with IIS 7.0, I actually found some blogs that were saying that SCCM 2007 wasn't supported until SP1.

As far as 2008 on an ESX platform, it ran great.

And I plan to migrate our MS server 2000/2003 platforms to 2008 by end of year, even with the SCCM 2007 disappointment. My googlefu was weak when researching that setup.

As far as Hyper-V is concerned, from what I have seen so far, it really does not offer any thing that our current virtual environment doesn't already have, then there is the expense of new hardware that is optimized to work with the Hyper-V, and then it is still a BETA release.

We will consider H-V in the future, and compare it to ESX, but not now.


Thanks for your response!

dave



mserafine -> RE: SCCM 2007 & VMWare Discussion (4/23/2008 1:39:44 PM)

Well you are correct about the hardware requirements of Hyper-V, in addition to the fact that it's not ready for production environments. But it's certainly going to be a terrific virtualizaiton option when everything is said and done. I've been using the beta version to host my virtual domain at home, which is running SCCM 2007 and SCOM 2007 w/ACS, and I haven't had a single problem.

I'll say this about VMWare though. My customer hosts most of their SMS 2003 sites on ESX servers w/o issue (their largest hierarchy consists of about 10,000 clients around the world), and I'd expect that SCCM 2007 in the same environment would run just as well.



dmaber -> Sizing the VM for the application (4/29/2008 8:01:59 PM)

There's seems to still be a lot of misunderstanding about Virtual environments out there.

There is absolutely no reason why SMS / SCCM can't run just as well in a virtual environment, the same goes with SQL or Exchange, just cause it's a database or CPU intensive does not mean that they are not good candidates for virtualization.  at least in a VMware environment anymore, I believe that Microsoft not supporting SCCM on VMware is a bit of a cop out as it's a far better solution that the MS virtualization products.

The important factors are not whether the environment is physical or virtual but that the server is sized correctly and the correct amount of RAM & CPU is made available to the VM and you present the correct type of disk from your SAN for disk intensive applications (e.g. 15k SCSI or SAS for SQL Exch | Slower SATA for more storage based disk).  after all you wouldn't try running a SCCM Central site with 7000 clients on P3 800 with 512MB RAM &  IDE disk and you shouldn't try doing the same on a Virtual Server. 

If you want to run SCCM or SQL or Exch in a VM then all you need to do is size it as you would in a physical environment (RAM / CPU / NIC/ DISK) and create a VM with the same spec, in an ESX environment the vmkernel has a very low CPU / RAM overhead so the VM is very close to native speeds; the important thing is that the underlying hardware matches the application you are using it for.

Then of course there are all the benefits virtualization (in Vmware) can give you like dynamic resource allocation, which provides CPU and RAM to the VM's that require it and not to the VM's which are sitting there idle... why pay for server performance and don't use it? then of course there's things like simplified backup/portability & vmotion..

If you profile the load of servers in most environments these days you'll find that unless there is a lot of virtualization already in place most servers are only 10-20% utilized.. that's a heap of wasted performance and power!

I've done over half a dozen implementations of SCCM & SQL in ESX VM's supporting between 1000-7000 clients internationally without any problems (well except the ones Microsoft put in there whenever they RTM their products ;-) )

at the end of the day the important thing to remember is that good design and server sizing is the most important part of a successful implementation whether physical or virtual. 



mp115 -> RE: Sizing the VM for the application (6/24/2008 4:33:35 PM)

I'm just now starting to spec out a new server for SCCM, to replace our existing SMS 2003, and I wanted to find out how you're configuring your disk capacity if you're running under ESX server.  We're currently supporting about 20,000 clients with one primary SMS 2003 server (PowerEdge 6600 with a DAS 4.3 TB array) and 65 secondary site servers .  We're not currently running any ESX servers, but I've been using one in a test environment for a few months and I'm running about 15 of our site servers on the free VMware Server.  Instead of spec'ng out just an SMS server, I was thinking about working up a full ESX implementation that would host other VMs along with the SCCM primary server.  How do you setup your RAID on your ESX box?  Do you just do one large RAID-5 or break it up?  I'm used to the Windows side of things using a two 73 gig drives in a RAID-1 for the OS and RAID-5 for most everything else, but as far as an ESX host goes, how is everyone else doing it?




jgeiser -> RE: Sizing the VM for the application (6/27/2008 6:24:12 PM)

I've been running a single SMS site server for about 2 years in ESX with no problems at all.
It's serving ~400 chunks.. er clients[;)] so it's fairly small at 1 cpu and 512MB of memory.

mp115,
You'd probably get more/better answers if you posted over on vmware.com's forums.
Your question seems to imply that you’re only going to run a single ESX host? You'd be missing out on some important features of ESX if that was the case.
On a cluster that's been configured for HA & DRS you’re going to need some type of shared storage for your VMs.
For instance, all of our VMs are hosted on a NetApp using iSCSI. (although at your size I'm guessing you already have some type of SAN in place)

The hosts only need a small Raid 1 array to host the ESX OS.



number8teen -> RE: Sizing the VM for the application (7/22/2008 5:48:13 PM)

Everyone keeps saying that Microsoft doesn't support VM's... I don't think that's true.  In discussing with my company's TAM, if there is an issue and Microsoft suspects it is related to VMWare, they may ask you to create a physical box for testing and/or coordinate support of the issue with VMWare  and Microsoft support.  I don't see this is a cop-out at all; they are trying not to have to support a product they don't own.  Also, given the small chance any issue would be related, the possiblity of having to V to P a server is not that likely. 

Just my two cents, in case the supposed lack of supportability is a huge sticking point for anyone.



nrunge -> RE: Sizing the VM for the application (7/22/2008 10:17:54 PM)

We run SCCM on our ESX server. No issues as of yet. <= 3,000 seats at 5 regional campus locations.



mhurley -> RE: Sizing the VM for the application (7/24/2008 8:48:45 AM)

At Toyota we have been running 4 of our SMS 2003 child primary sites on ESX VMs for a year now. There is no noticeable difference in performance between those and the physical servers. What is nice on the VMs is when we increase client load on the sites we are quickly and easily able to up the resources allocated to SQL and SMS.

We are implementing our upgrade from SMS to SCCM and will be replacing all current physical Child Primaries with ESX VMs.

We are keeping our SCCM Central Site a physical box for now.

I will post back if we find any issues with performance or support.



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