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.