P2V 100+ physical machines...

X

xxan0xx

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 12, 2006
Messages
153
Outside of VMWare Converter solution has anyone else used a tool for doing large number of P2Vs ... I was looking for something like Racemi or RiverMeadow but minus the AWS / Cloud aspect of things. It looks like Racemi supports this, just waiting on a response from them.

Anyways... looking to see if anyone else has tackled a project like this and had any feedback..
 
I've used a product similar to RiverMeadow, and it does make management of the entire thing a lot easier
We were only doing about 20 VMs at the time, so we weren't afraid to fall back to vCenter converter, but for the amount you're dealing with it is certainly cause for trouble.

To save yourself headaches, I think it's a good way to go, and you'll get their support on if a conversion has trouble (usually physical drivers causing the system to die on boot, can be disabled via rescue disks, but a huge pain as well). This is all assuming you are willing to pony up the cash. I believe rivermeadow is a license per conversion kind of deal.
 
Do you already pay for NetBackup? I was flipping through some release notes and it sounds like you can use BMR to take your physical backups and send them to a VM.

I would imagine you could also do it with other cloning solutions as you just pop in your boot DVD, CD, etc and transfer it over the network. I've done that in the past with Symantec Ghost where I took a physical pc and cloned it into a VM. That might be more cumbersome than what you want though as there is usually an intermediate step of saving the data instead of going directly from one host to another.
 
BMR backup and restore is a bit manual and we don't have Netbackup or similar solution deployed in that environment mostly because it's a distributed application deployment where backups aren't the most useful.

Right now cost isn't so much an option, as I'm mostly trying to optimize on streamlining the process and make it as efficient as possible since I have 10 racks that I have to do this for.
 
Assuming these are Windows physical boxes VMware Converter could easily handle this. I'd setup a VMware Converter server to handle the orchestration and then kick it off. Automate the clean-up of physical software/drivers with Puppet or another configuration management tool and then be done with it.

Most critical part is ensuring that everything is successfully online after the cutover and that none of the old physical boxes come back online. I'd also make sure that high-IO services are stopped on the clients prior to kicking off P2V. VMware Converter can support VSS-based snapshots before/after initiating the process however there are limits on how much true-up it can do (like databases/etc.).

Also, another suggestion--why not build fresh virtual servers? In my experience, there are usually very few applications that cannot be installed quickly and easily, and you usually end up with less than 5% that need to leverage P2V. You can also get rid of depreciated operating systems during the process.

One other tip--if you are entirely within a private network and not concerned about traffic sniffing, turn off SSL for the conversion process. It will go unbelievably faster. There are some guides online regarding the appropriate XML configuration file to change.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top