A new addition to this blog

Just a quick note to let all our readers know that as of this week this blog will not be limited to the experiences we have migrating to VMWare Virtual Infrastructure but that we have started a project to implement VMWare Virtual Desktop Infrastructure for our outsourced development team in India.

As it has been very hard to find solid business case information for a proper scale VDI implementation (which was the reason for starting this blog in the first place) we will be pioneering some. I have had some nice and informative replies on a topic on the VMWare forums but also found that others are looking into VDI but have the same problem as we do.

Hopefully the addition of the VDI project will be a worthy addition to this blog.

Oracle 10g Grid Control and AS servers virtualized

Also yesterday we converted our Oracle 10g Grid Control server. This is the server that we use for managing our Oracle databases and to which all these servers write their backup and archiving data (in practice: all servers have their \archive and \backup folders mounted to the management server).

As this server was still using direct attached storage the bulk of the conversion time went into copying all the backup data to the designated storage tier. Then the machine was PowerConverted and the backup and archive mounts on the database servers refreshed.

This morning we noticed that the machine was using just 11% of the allocated 3GB so we slashed that be 50%.

A much easier conversion was that of an Oracle AS (Application Server) server. This was just PowerConverted without problems. This morning we decided to shrink the memory allocated to that machine from 3GB to 1GB as it was just using 6% of it’s memory.

Both GSX Servers migrated

As of yesterday we have no more GSX Server running as all virtual machines from the second GSX Server were migrated with VMWare Importer to the VI. Nothing real special during the migration as we tend to make it easy for ourselves.

Because we used Linux as operating system for our GSX server we just install a Samba server so the engineer doing the migrations can make a local share on his laptop (running Vista in this case). Then it’s just a question of copying an converting the machines.