MPR Week 4

No progress this week unfortunately as two-thirds of the department is out with a virus (the non-computer related kind) or on holiday.

Server Based Computing for outsourced development

Leostream and VMWare have a very interesting recording of a recent webinar about using VDI in Outsourced Development scenario’s. We are looking into such a situation ourselves for an offshore development center and I got a lot of practical information about Leostreams Virtual Desktop Connection Broker and implementing VDI for an offshore scenario.

If this case flies the implementation of our VDI will ofcourse also end up here. Expect something in the next few weeks.

The webinar can be found through Leostream’s website: http://www.leostream.com/news.html. I don’t know how long this will stay but a direct link is this: webinar recording @ VMware.

MPR Week 3 - Friday

Well, it turned out that the slow conversion of the second system was probably due to a problem with PowerConvert not assigning the fixed IP address. In the end we decided to enter it manually into the VM and then the conversion went on.

After the conversion the software didn’t want to start up all the services (which we later figured out could be software related because of the need for specific configuration of a local administrator account). When it seemed the conversion failed we shut down the VM and booted the physical machine. After adding that computer to the domain again (because the new VM uses the same computer account) all the services started up nicely. We will retry this conversion at a later date.

What we have learned:

• After a failed conversion you need to put the original server into the domain again. This requires rebooting the machine so you can’t do this during operating hours (at least we can’t).
• Because of the above point we will only LiveTransfer machines out of office hours. So while LiveTransfer is a nice option it gets you into trouble anyway if a conversion fails
• We will put a small DHCP scope into our Server VLAN so we don’t have to use a different VLAN during the migration

MPR Week 3 - First conversions

We have converted our first machines !

The first conversion went without a hitch in 1 hour and 15 minutes with PowerConvert. It was a Windows 2000 server with SQL Server 2000. This was a plain archiving server.

The second conversion is running as we speak. This is also a Windows 2000 server with SQL Server 2000 and it is the server for Pegasys 2000 by Johnson Controls. This controls all our physical access to our offices (door locks etc.)

Other than it being a bit slow with finalizing the conversion all seems to go well.

VMware Whitepapers

I was browsing around the VMWare website for inspiration for a presentation I had to make for an information session about our project and ran into some whitepapers I missed in my earlier visits.

I found them all quite interesting to read so here are the links:

• Virtualization Overview: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/virtualization.pdf
• Building Virtual Infrastructure with VMWare VirtualCenter: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi_wp.pdf
• Building the Virtualized Enterprise With VMware Infrastructure: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmware_infrastructure_wp.pdf
• Making Your Business Disaster Ready with Virtual Infrastructure: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/disaster_recovery.pdf

MPR Week 2

This week we migrated all the servers that we wanted to keep from our testing environment to the production environment. One setback was the loss of our templates when we switched to another Virtual Center Management Server. It wasn’t just a question of the templates disappearing but we literally can’t find them on the shared storage resource where they are supposed to be.

While not the end of the world it cost us some time making new templates.

Next week we will try our hand at a first PowerConvert. The machine in question is a Windows XP desktop that is an application server for a CRM application. Why it’s on a desktop is a long story but it’s one of the reasons we want this machine converted first.

MPR - Week 1 - Thursday

Today we welcomed a new inhabitant of our serverroom:

Yes, the Clariion CX3-40 has arrived. At the moment it’s just the rack and controllers. The rest is still in the boxes in the second photo. That will be installed by EMC in the coming week (appointment not yet made).

One surprise was the fact that this cage comes with two power connectors where we currently only have room for one extra cage on our APC Symmetra. The APC racks we use only have one connector but I could have known that this cage used split power circuits.

Also the servers have been mounted and VC and ESX has been installed. Now all we have to do is point the ESX servers to the correct storage and move the first machines over from our VI3 test environment.

MPR - Week 1 - Tuesday

Today we had the following progress:

• The migration plan was finished in concept.
• The total migration load of the project is 124 servers. They are split like this:
  • 92 physical servers to virtual
  • 27 VMWare GSX to VI3
  • 7 ESX 2.5 to VI3
• Among these servers are:
  • 52 Linux servers
  • 72 Windows servers

Thursday the migration plan will be reviewed with the goal of having a definitive plan by Friday including preliminary migration dates which then have to be checked with several key business processes because of the related downtime of their systems.

Thursday will also see the installation of VI3, VC2 and PowerConvert on the designated servers (they will be mounted in their racks tomorrow). If we need it we will also use VMWare VMI (Virtual Machine Importer) and VMWare P2V Assistant (the Starter Edition included in the VI3 license).

The necessary vSwitches will be configured and bonded to the NIC’s and the servers will get some storage assigned (there is some room on the old arrays) so we can start with migrations ahead of the new SAN.

Migration Progress Report (MPR)

Now that everything we need has been delivered I will start with writing migration progress reports (dubbed MPR’s for short). To keep things relatively organized they will have the weeknumber and if necessary the weekday in the title.

So keeping to my own naming convention the first one (my next post today) will be MPR - Week 1 - Tuesday.

3.01 and MS Exchange

In earlier posts I commented on what we will not virtualize. One of the application I mentioned was MS Exchange due to the lack of 64bit support (needed for Exchange 2007).

With the release of VI3.01 today there is production support for W2003 64 bit edition but in the end we decided against virtualizing our Exchange environment. Apart from the extra licensing for VI3 which makes it more expensive than just replacing the servers we feel it will make our environment more complex a bit too soon.

Because of our experiences with Exchange we would still cluster the servers with MS Cluster Services but at the moment only a handful of SAN’s support VMotion for MS clustered servers so we would need to take extra measures with regards to which host an Exchange cluster VM is located.

Should the replacement of the Exchange servers have come somewhere in 2007 we might have made a different decision but at the moment we don’t want to make that step yet.

The projected Exchange environment is as follows:

• 2 Exchange Frontend servers (IBM x3550) in loadbalanced cluster
• 3 Exchange Backend servers (IBM x3650) in active-active-passive configuration
• 1 Bridgehead server (IBM x336, will become available through virtualization)
• 1 Global Catalog (IBM x346, will also become available through virtualization)

All the new servers (the x3550 and x3650) will have the new dual core Xeon’s. This is an environment sized for heavy traffic on 4000 mailboxes and 10000 public folders.