Download Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 Installation Guide

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 Installation Guide
Chapter 9. Planning your Data Center
Successful planning is essential for a highly available, scalable Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization
environment.
Although it is assumed that your solution architect has defined the environment before installation, the
following considerations must be made when designing the system.
CPU
Virtual Machines must be distributed across hosts so that enough capacity is available to handle higher
than average loads during peak processing. Average target utilization will be 50% of available CPU.
Memory
T he Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization page sharing process overcommits up to 150% of physical
memory for virtual machines. T herefore, allow for an approximately 30% overcommit.
Networking
When designing the network, it is important to ensure that the volume of traffic produced by storage,
remote connections and virtual machines is taken into account. As a general rule, allow approximately 50
MBps per virtual machine.
It is best practice to separate disk I/O traffic from end-user traffic, as this reduces the load on the
Ethernet connection and reduces security vulnerabilities by isolating data from the visual stream. For
Ethernet networks, it is suggested that bonds (802.3ad) are utilized to aggregate server traffic types.
Note
It is possible to connect both the storage and Hypervisors via a single high performance switch.
For this configuration to be effective, the switch must be able to provide 30 GBps on the
backplane.
High Availability
T he system requires at least two hosts to achieve high availability. T his redundancy is useful when
performing maintenance or repairs.
9.1. Data Centers
Following Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager installation it is necessary to define the data
centers, and clusters, that you will use to organize your virtualization hosts. T he installation process
creates a data center, and associated cluster, called Default. T he storage type of the data center is
set based on the one selected during installation. If you wish to make use of other storage types then
you will need to add additional data centers and clusters to support them.
9.1.1. Prerequisites for Setting up a Data Center
Before you create a new data center, prepare the following resources. T he following tasks must be done
at the host level, not from the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization platform.
1. Setup and configure hosts. A host can be a Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor or a Red
Hat Enterprise Linux host. A cluster needs a minimum of one host, and at least one active host is
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