VMware Infrastructure 3 - 3 months in

After installing VMware Infrastructure 3 approximately three months ago it's time to summarize the experience so far.

General

We have virtualized 20 servers, including a few test servers, and all of them behave very nicely without any problems at all. Two seperate instances of Oracle, one Lotus Domino server, several domain controllers and other application servers have all been either reinstalled as virtual servers or migrated using VMware Converter (beta). . We haven't had a single hiccup or serious problem with any of our virtualized servers nor the physical servers running our infrastructure. Another very welcome output of our virtualization project is that our cooling systems now have a lot less heat to fight with, which makes my datacenter much better to work in. I haven't seen any numbers yet, but I'm pretty sure our power bills are also seeing this benefit.

P2V

Tool of Choice: VMware Converter - An extremely easy tool to use when doing P2V work, as illustrated by the screenshots I have published. The two phase process outlined there worked really well when migrating a physical server located in our DMZ to a VM. I connected my laptop directly to the physical server with a crossover cable, configured the network and let the converter do it's thing. After re-connecting my laptop to our server network segment I imported the new VM into our ESX server and configured it to use the DMZ Virtual Network. That was that. Since this was a small gateway server the whole process took about 45 minutes to complete, from start to end. It would of course take significantly longer if the data areas on the server were bigger.

What virtualization made us capable of

We decided to virtualize one of our main Lotus Domino servers, and as we all know email is definitely business critical and significant downtime is really not an option. The sheer size of our Domino based databases, as well as the fact that the Domino server had local storage, forced us to try and think outside the (physical)box. A qualified guesstimate gave us an ETA of 15hours worth of file copy action if we were to copy the whole Domino data directory over the network to the new VM. We ended up with a twelve-step program for Domino migration:

• 1. Set up temporary virtualized Domino server as well as the new permanent virtualized one.
• 2. Configure the temp server, with a large vmdk, to replicate all databases from the server we were replacing.
• 3. Start the replication process, and take the weekend off.
• 4. Verify the replication, and shutdown the smtp and router tasks on the physical server.
• 5. Shutdown the temporary virtualized server.
• 6. Move the vmdk from step 2 over to the permanent server (on the filesystem).
• 7. Add the existing data disk as a new hdd in the permanent servers configuration, and add it in Windows.
• 8. Configure Windows to use the same IPs as the old server.
• 9. Configure the Domino installation to use the databases in the data disk.
• 10. Start the Domino server and make sure that replication with the other servers was working properly.
• 11. Start the SMTP and Router tasks on new server.
• 12. Smile.

So, what did we accomplish by doing this? Well, for one we managed to get all the data over from the physical server into the SAN based infrastrucure without any downtime at all. Then, by moving the vmdk inside the SAN we avoided the whole "file copy over the network takes forever problem", as that's done in a couple of seconds. Basically what it boils down to, is the capability to mix and match with VMs that makes it possible to do large tasks like this in a much less painful and more efficient way than we could have done without this technology. Of course there was some downtime involved with this as well, but the total downtime was reduced to about one hour. If we had done this with normal file copying it would have been significantly more, possibly well over 15 hours. BTW: If anyone knows a way to move a vmdk from one VM to another inside the Virtual Infrastructure Client, please let me know. I did it by SSH'ing into one of the VMware servers and moving and renaming it there. The ability to do this within the VI Client would be welcomed though, as portability really is one of most attractive features with virtualization.

Summary

Thats it for now, I'm sure I'll have more fun VMware stories to tell as we continue to explore the opportunities the new virtualized datacenter gives us. We're only just beginning to see the possibilities here. Next phase is probably trying to run one or more Citrix servers on VI3, we'll see how that goes as Citrix has been something you would try to avoid virtualizing in the past.

Posted by Christian Mohn aka h0bbel