MPR Week 5

Today we have converted two more machines. Again these were with PowerConvert and with a little tweaking they went smooth. We also tested the connectivity between our two datacenters with regards to conversions and that also posed no problem with the data coming into the ESX server with 30Mbit/sec, which is enough for future conversions. At one point the two conversions were running simultaniously with both streams making 30 Mbit/sec.

We did run into some problems again so I’ll list them for your future reference:

• Virusscanner software interferes with PowerConvert
• The time on the converted server must be equal to the time on the PowerConvert server before conversion starts
• We use static IP numbers whenever (before, during and after conversion) we can but it turned out to be necessary to have a small DHCP scope in the LAN segment because somewhere in the conversion process either the new VM or the old server tries to get an IP address through DHCP.

One servers migration failed on datacopy. After some troubleshooting we tried it again but the conversion failed again. It turned out that the PowerConvert service was hanging from the previous attempt and PowerConvert tried to install it a second time (which failed ofcourse). A reboot of the server fixed that problem.

The conversion then failed again for unknown reasons. We then used the “Take Control” method of converting in stead of the LiveTransfer and that did the trick.