Planning and configuring hypervisor compute layer with SCVMM

In this section we will learn to plan and configure hypervisor resources such as Hyper-V hosts and clusters, VMware and Citrix hypervisors. In a WAP-based cloud solution the hypervisor layer has to be in control of SCVMM for IaaS services provisioning and lifecycle management.

In this section we will cover various ways of adding and managing a hypervisor layer in SCVMM.

Planning and creating SCVMM host groups

In a large scale cloud deployment comprising hundreds of Hyper-V hosts and thousands of virtual machines or more, managing the hosts effectively in terms of resource provisioning and controlling becomes challenging. SCVMM host groups can be used to avoid such challenges, it provides flexibilities to group multiple hypervisor hosts and uses as a single entity for resource provisioning and management.

Host group planning would have a different foundation and strategy for organizations and service providers. A few common options are as follows:

• Site or geo location
• Performance and capabilities such as fault tolerance and so on
• Isolated environment of the web zone environment such as DMZ
• Dedicated host groups for large tenants in a service provider's cloud
• Host groups with or without BC and DR
• Cloud management infra and tenant workload infra
• Many more

We can add Hyper-V hosts or clusters and VMware/Citrix hosts in a host group and define various settings at host group level such as:

• General settings.
• Placement rules.
• Host reserve settings (CPU, memory, network and storage bandwidth, and so on.)
• Dynamic optimization.
• Power optimization.
• Network and storage resources and quota.
• PRO configuration.
• Custom properties.

Host groups can be nested to providers' greater level of hierarchy and management. By default child host groups inherit parent host group settings and policies, which can be overridden at child host group level. Hypervisor hosts can be moved from one host group to another.

You can create SCVMM cloud consisting of multiple host groups. SCVMM cloud will be discussed in detail in Chapter 4, Building VM Clouds and IaaS Offerings.

Creating host groups

Following are the steps to create host groups:

1. Login to SCVMM server using VMM console and open fabric workspace.
2. Expand Servers in the Fabric menu, right click on All Hosts.
   
3. Click Create Host Group and provide the host group friendly name.
4. Configure host group properties.
   

Adding virtual machine hosts in host groups

After creating host groups, we can add virtual machine hosts in their respective group to apply host group level policies. We can choose to add already configured hypervisor or cluster or perform bare metal provisioning using SCVMM. We can also create a Hyper-V cluster of already configured standalone Hyper-V hosts using SCVMM.

Adding Hyper-V host in a host group

Following are the steps to add a Hyper-V host in a host group:

1. Login to SCVMM server using VMM console and open fabric workspace.
2. Right click on host group created and select Add Hyper-V Hosts and Clusters.
   
3. Provide the Windows Server location in the given option.
4. Provide credentials for accessing the host by using RunAs account or manual credentials.
5. Fill in discovery scope details depending upon the server location provided earlier.
6. Select target host groups and host setting.
7. Review the configuration summary and finish the wizard to add the host.