Monday 16 April 2012

My Projects: Virtualization - part 2: P2V

Here is the next post in "My Projects" series, and the second one about Virtualization.

After migration from XEN was finished, we started to migrate all existing physical machines to virtual. Generally, this was one of the most light project for the last couple of years. First of all - VMware Converter 4.0 has been released, so all CentOS-es were migrated smoothly, without an issue. Second - while migrating VMs from XEN, I've collected so much experience, that some tasks which seemed very complicated before, now was a kind of obvious for me (e.g. like playing with LVM volumes).

What we had:

A bunch of  physical servers (IBM) with a range of OSes installed (mainly RH-based).

What was done:

  • Most of servers were migrated using VMware Converter.
  • Some of those old ones were migrated manually as in previous project.
  • Some servers were reinstalled as VMs and just services were migrated.

Result:

The result is pretty obvious for this kind of migration. However I'll provide a couple of benefits:
  • Increased reliability. Very small  system outage after H/W failure (That even happened twice. HA automatically migrated all VMs to the another ESXi host.)
  • Uninterrupted maintenance. I just migrate all VMs to another host in cluster during the upgrade.
  • Energy savings. I cannot provide exact quotas, but I was really surprised when review last report. We save really a lot.
  • Convenience. Add/remove some disk space/RAM/vCPUs is just several mouse clicks now.

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