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SelectelTechDay: how it was


On April 5, the third SelectelTechDay conference was held, which brought together about 200 representatives of organizations from various fields of activity. The atmosphere of friendly communication, interesting reports and interactive demonstration of the capabilities of the new Selectel VMware Cloud service are just some of the events in which the guests of the event took part.

Event recording is available on our Youtube channel .
Presentations of the speakers are available for viewing on the link .

Let's tell about everything one after another, welcome under kat.

Tours of the data center



Each of our data centers is a place where many systems work smoothly, ensuring stable operation of server equipment in 24/7/365 mode. But it is better to see once than hear a hundred times. Therefore, traditionally, we organized tours of the server rooms and talked in detail about how everything works on the example of the Data Center Flower-2 .
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Tatiana Svirko, the head of the engineering and technical department, told us about the parameters monitored by the specialists on duty at the engineering office, from where day-to-day monitoring of all data center systems is maintained.

The following stopping points are:


During the excursions, visitors were told in detail about how the data centers are arranged, what measures are taken in case of emergency situations and how to keep the equipment and data intact.

For many who were with us for the first time, this has become a completely new knowledge.


“We work closely with VMware products and I was interested to visit a modern data center with a zone of VMware servers. I expect interesting reports on the implementation of the VMware cloud in your data center »

Maria Bashun (Fast Lane, Manager)


“It was interesting to visit the data center. In our company, our small data center, it was curious to find out how it is organized from the great uncles. I understood the shoals that we have, and what's not so bad. I looked at the server, I appreciated the scale. Shock, of course, not - everything is as it should be. It was funny to see racks with “towers” ​​and hanging wires to compare with your neat racks. I wish you: develop further. You are on the edge of technology - the future is already on; if you keep up this pace, you will always have something to show. Just keep evolving. ”

Artem Chekulaev (Technical Director of Teleklik Company)


New Selectel VMware Cloud service



On the day of the conference, a significant event took place - a new service, Selectel VMware Cloud, was introduced into commercial operation, a cloud solution that allows you to create a private and hybrid cloud based on VMware software and Intel hardware platform. The service is out of testing and made available to customers. Now you can order a virtual data center with payment for the actual consumption of resources.

The new service is aimed at customers who are already using VMware virtualization in their IT infrastructure, and is positioned to use according to 4 possible scenarios:


All these scenarios are paid by Pay-as-you-go with hourly billing. The main focus was on enabling customers to build their own hybrid cloud based on the new service. This allows you to habitually use the existing infrastructure, if necessary, using the resources of Selectel for rapid scaling or redundancy.

Architecture


Cloud Selectel VMware Cloud deployed on the basis of data centers Dubrovka-3 (primary data center) and Flower-2 (backup data center). The decision contains the so-called arbitration servers installed in the TsDorochnaya -1 data center (primary arbiter) and Berzarina-1 (reserve arbitrator). Thus, arbitration servers constantly monitor the availability of the primary and backup data centers, initiating the process of restarting virtual machines if any of them is completely unavailable.


Alexander Krenev, development manager for network virtualization in Russia and the CIS, from VMware, in his report noted that currently it is the hyperconvergent architecture implemented in Selectel VMware Cloud that is most in demand on the market, allowing you to manage everything from one point and at once increase capacity when necessary.

He also told how to perform migration between the clouds and about the capabilities of the software network platform NSX and vSAN technology, which allows you to create “stretched” clusters for data storage.

Implementation


To ensure the high performance of the infrastructure, Intel solutions optimized for use in hyperconvergent architecture systems were used as a hardware platform:



The network part is implemented by hardware based on Brocade equipment, and a powerful VMware NSX tool is used as a software solution for network virtualization within virtual data centers. Its main advantage is the flexibility of configuration and ease of management of complex network configurations.

Partner reports



The SelectelTechDay conference gathered speakers from representatives of the IT industry leaders: VMware, Intel, Microsoft, Veeam . Here are the reports most listeners remembered:


Maxim Didik, Microsoft Partner Relations Representative, spoke about the benefits of using cloud technologies and the concept of “digital transformation” in the foreseeable future.


Dmitry Ilyin, director for work with suppliers of the MONT group of companies, presented the guests a presentation in which he spoke about the possible options and licensing schemes for Microsoft products in the cloud infrastructure.


Sergey Kunko, Systems Engineer Veeam, provided information about the new features of software products that provide backup and recovery of data from various applications and services deployed in the cloud environment.

After the lunch break, the declared demonstration was waiting for the conference guests. The fact is that beautiful and loud words very often disagree with the real state of affairs. That is why the man-made “catastrophe” was planned, which will be discussed further.

Live demonstration of the reliability of Selectel VMware Cloud


In order to guarantee the operation of systems even in the event of problems in the data center, it is necessary to ensure the fault tolerance of clouds for virtual machines.

Alexander Tugov, Director of Services Development, and Roman Dashevsky, VMware project manager, Selectel, demonstrated our infrastructure in a situation of abnormal power outages at the main site, thereby emulating the complete inaccessibility of the data center.

Preparing a demo stand


As a “homework”, our specialists carried out the following actions:

  1. Two data centers, Dubrovka-3 and Flower-2, created a resilient VMware resource pool based on Stretched vSAN technology.


  2. In this resource pool, a virtual data center was created from the control panel with the corresponding characteristics.
  3. We launched a test site on WordPress in a virtual machine.
  4. We have prepared a demonstration dashboard with monitoring using Grafana .

Live demo


An interactive demonstration was scheduled for the second half of the day, and, by the way, conference participants were looking forward to it.

One of the pages of the test site was edited by selecting the message “Good luck!” From the audience. All conference guests were also able to track the availability of the site directly from their laptops and mobile devices.

On the screen were displayed:


The lead engineer Artem Anisimov was powering off all the servers in half of the cluster located in the Dubrovka-3 data center.


On the dashboard with monitoring, the shutdown of servers located in Dubrovka-3 was displayed. In the terminal, the echo requests stopped loading and the test site stopped loading from client devices.

The virtual machine restarted in the second half of the cluster, and the test site after a minute became available again with all the current data that did not fall back into the past and were not lost.

After turning on the power at the servers on Dubrovka-3, the virtual machine hosts went up within 5 minutes and became fully accessible, as guests could observe on the dashboard.

Guest reviews


During the event, we tried not only to provide interesting information, but also to learn the opinion of the audience. Give them the word:


“Everything went great. I really liked the tour of the data center: interesting and informative. An interesting experiment with power shutdown, it’s really great that the company is ready to demonstrate the efficiency of its own products in production. And what is very important in such events is a large number of useful contacts. We have already exchanged business cards with some representatives of the companies. We may work in the future. ”

Alexander Litreev (CEO of Vee Security OĂś)


“An interesting direction is the trend of migration to the clouds. He came to keep abreast of new products, in the course of what is happening. We are your partners - we rent racks and virtual servers for resale. I heard what I wanted, it is always pleasant for me to be in Selectel - everything is organized according to the highest standard, participants ask interesting questions, you can learn a lot of new things. I do not regret that I came here (laughs). I am at SelectelTechDay for the second time, and once again I am convinced that Selectel is a serious company, professionals. I have long appreciated this: Selectel is a reliable solution for those who are going to deploy [here] business ”

Alexander Gordienko (Deputy Head of the Development Department of the Science-Svyaz company)


Conclusion


Perhaps the finest part of the conference was its final, when the prize drawing was held. The winners, whose names were chosen at random, received gifts from Selectel and partner companies.

I would like to note that carrying out SelectelTechDay in the current format would be impossible without the support of our information partners:


We thank all the participants and guests of the conference for their time and hope to see you at the next SelectelTechDay!

We are waiting for your wishes and suggestions in the comments.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/353198/

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