April 10, 2018 at 15:21

SelectelTechDay: how it was


    On April 5, the third SelectelTechDay conference was held, bringing together about 200 representatives of organizations from various fields of activity. The atmosphere of friendly communication, interesting presentations and an 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 speakers are available for viewing here .

    We will tell you everything in order, welcome to cat.

    Data Center Tours



    Each of our data centers is a place where many systems work smoothly, ensuring stable operation of server equipment 24/7/365. But it’s better to see once than hear a hundred times. Therefore, traditionally, we organized tours of the server rooms and spoke in detail about how everything is arranged using the example of the Flower-2 data center .

    In the engineering room, from where round-the-clock monitoring of the operation of all data center systems is carried out, the head of the engineering department, Tatyana Svirko, told which parameters are monitored by duty specialists.

    The following stopping points were:

    • server rooms with the equipment of our customers;
    • racks with Selectel equipment to ensure the operation of our services;
    • places of installation of power units, power cabinets and a hall with uninterruptible power batteries;
    • server rooms with a secure perimeter.

    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 became a completely new knowledge.


    “We work closely with VMware products and I was interested in visiting a modern data center with a zone of VMware servers. I look forward to 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. Our company has its own small data center, it was curious to find out how it is organized for large uncles. I understood the jambs that we have, and what is not so bad. I looked at the server, appreciated the scale. Of course, there is no shock - 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 border of technology - the future is already further, if you keep this pace, you will always have something to show. Just keep developing. ”

    Artyom Chekulaev (Teleklik Technical Director)


    New Selectel VMware Cloud Service



    On the day of the conference, a significant event took place - the new Selectel VMware Cloud service was put into commercial operation, a cloud solution that allows creating a private and hybrid cloud based on VMware software and Intel hardware platform. The service left the testing stage and became 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 already use VMware virtualization in their IT infrastructure, and is positioned for use in 4 possible scenarios:

    • expanding your own data center in the cloud;
    • moving work applications to the cloud;
    • cloud as a backup data center;
    • cloud for application development and testing.

    All these scenarios are paid by Pay-as-you-go with hourly billing. The main emphasis 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 Selectel resources for quick scaling or redundancy.

    Architecture


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


    Alexander Krenev, network virtualization development manager in Russia and the CIS, from VMware, in his report noted that at the moment it is the hyper-converged architecture implemented in Selectel VMware Cloud that is the most popular on the market, allowing you to manage everything from one point and immediately build capacity when necessary.

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

    Implementation


    To ensure high infrastructure performance, Intel solutions were optimized for use in systems with hyperconverged architecture as a hardware platform:



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

    Partner Reports



    SelectelTechDay conference brought together speakers from representatives of IT industry leaders: VMware, Intel, Microsoft, Veeam . Here are the reports that were most remembered by the audience:


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


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


    Sergey Kunko, a Veeam system engineer, provided information on new features of software products that provide backup and data recovery of various applications and services deployed in the cloud.

    After the lunch break, the declared demonstration was waiting for the conference guests. The fact is that beautiful and loud words very often diverge from the real state of affairs. That is why a man-made "disaster" was planned, which will be discussed further.

    Selectel VMware Cloud Live Demonstration of Reliability


    In order to guarantee the operation of systems, even if problems arise in the data center, it is necessary to ensure the resiliency of the clouds for virtual machines.

    Alexander Tugov, Director for Services Development, and Roman Dashevsky, VMware, Selectel project manager, demonstrated our infrastructure in the event of an emergency power outage at the main site, thereby emulating the complete inaccessibility of the data center.

    Preparing a demo stand


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

    1. Two data centers - Dubrovka-3 and Tsvetochnaya-2 created a fault-tolerant VMware resource pool based on Stretched vSAN technology .


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

    Real time demo


    An interactive demonstration was planned in the afternoon, and, by the way, the conference participants looked forward to it.

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

    The following were displayed:

    • Dashboard with cluster availability metrics;
    • Control Panel my.selectel.ru ;
    • Test site deployed in a virtual machine;
    • A terminal that checks site pings.

    The power of all the servers in half of the cluster located in the data center Dubrovka-3 was cut off by the efforts of the leading engineer Artyom Anisimov .


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

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

    After turning on the power at the servers on Dubrovka-3, the hosts of the virtual machines rose within 5 minutes and became fully accessible, as guests could watch on the dashboard.

    Guest reviews


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


    “Everything went great. I really liked the tour of the data center: interesting and informative. An interesting experiment with shutting down capacities, it is really great that the company is ready to demonstrate the operability of its own products in combat production. And what is very important in such events is a large number of useful contacts. We have already exchanged business cards with some company representatives. Perhaps we will work in the future. ”

    Alexander Litreev (CEO of Vee Security OÜ)


    “An interesting direction is the trend of migration to the clouds. Came to be aware of new products, in the know about 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 are asked interesting questions, there is a lot to learn for themselves. I’m not sorry that I came here (laughs). This is my second time at SelectelTechDay, and once again I am convinced that Selectel is a serious company, professionals. I appreciated it a long time ago: Selectel is a reliable solution for those who are going to develop [here] business ”

    Alexander Gordienko (Deputy Head of the Development Department of the Nauka-Svyaz Company)


    Conclusion


    Perhaps the most enjoyable part of the conference was its finale, when a prize draw took place. The winners, whose names were randomly selected, received gifts from Selectel and partner companies.

    I would like to note that holding SelectelTechDay in the current format would not have been possible without the support of our information partners:


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

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