MPR Week 8

A lot has happened again in the last week.

First we cleared out our old GSX server. All the VM’s on that server are now on the Virtual Infrastructure hosts so the server count is up to 33 VM’s. We used VMware Importer for the transfer and that went without problems. The procedure is fairly straightforward and we used a Samba share on the GSX server to access the VM’s from the engineer’s laptop that was running the Importer tool.

This week we will PowerConvert two more machines, both Oracle database server on Windows 2003 server and start planning the migration of our large fileservers (600, 500 and 400GB respectively) and Oracle database servers (6 servers, varying in size from 140 to 250GB in storage). Because we are in the middle of a migration to a new EMC/Cisco SAN we have asked the EMC engineers about best practices in this area and have been advised to use Raw Device Mapping (RDM) for these VM’s.

This makes migration of these servers simpler in the way that we only have to unmount the volumes from the physical server, PowerConvert it, map the LUN to the ESX host and mount the disk in the new VM.

If it really is that simple you will read it here ofcourse.