VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘P2V’

I’ve had my share of difficulties with the HP Server Utilities after a P2V migration. Granted, when you are building a new server the SmartStart CD makes life easy for completing the “Setup and installation for HP ProLiant ML and DL 300, 500 and 700 series and HP ProLiant BL Servers and supported server options”, but when that server restarts as a VM with the HP software still installed and running it is sluggish and slow. Extremely sluggish and slow in my experience.

After having to boot several VMs in Windows Safe Mode in order to prevent the various HP utilities and drivers from attempting to load I finally got a clue and made sure I disabled all HP Services before running the P2V conversion. That made the start up as a new VM better, but I still had to spend some quality time with Add/Remove Programs in the Windows Control Panel to uninstall all of those HP programs!

You may be thinking “OK. You should just uninstall all the HP Programs and Drivers before the P2V.” I could, but there goes my safety net, fall back plan. I want the physical server to remain operational exactly as it was in case something unexpected prevents the P2V from succeeding. It’s rare, but if it does happen I want to be able to power back on the physical server. Maintenance windows are short and I’m not one to make my night longer than necessary.

Looks like one of my GestaltIT Tech Field Day brothers has made my next late night date with HP server migrations a little easier. Simon Seagrave’s post VMware P2V – Easy Method to Remove HP Agents and Utilities is about the HP Proliant Support Pack Cleaner v1.1 utility available from ctxadmtools.musumeci.com.ar – a site self described as full of “FREE Tools for Citrix, Microsoft and VMware Administrators and Consultants.”

I haven’t tried this utility myself yet, there doesn’t appear to be any documentation for it, and Seagrave doesn’t mention how/when he uses the utility, so I’ll have to figure out later if my process of disabling all the HP services works with this Support Pack Cleaner. I imagine it’ll work fine. I’ll just run it after I boot the migrated VM for the first time.

Sorry Windows Control Panel and Add/Remove Programs, we’ve spent a lot of time together over the years but it’s time for me to move on. Thanks Simon!

Seagrave has also previously posted about a script to do the same job. Check out both of his posts!

At the VMworld 2009 Vizioncore booth I discovered 3 new free tools from Vizioncore that all VI administrators, no matter which popular hypervisor platform you use, should know about. vConverter SC, vControl Multi-Hypervisor Management, and vOptimizer WasteFinder offer unique features that accomplish and automate common virtual environment administrative tasks. These products include tools for P2V and V2V migrations between multiple vendor platforms, a web based multi hypervisor management server, and virtual disk optimization through VMDK alignment and wasted storage scanning.

Vizioncore is banking on creating wider interest and adoption of its full product suite in the virtualization market, but for now administrators definitely come out the winners with these great tools at no cost. The free products mentioned in this post (as well as all of Vizioncore’s software) can be downloaded here.

I’ve summarized these utilities in the rest of this post. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s inevitable. If you are a virtual infrastructure administrator, architect, or blogger you will eventually talk about VMware VMFS and virtual disk alignment. I’m not going to try to explain the concepts in this post. My goal is to discuss whether to align VMware virtual disks (VMDKs) and what options are available for performing the alignment.

Bottom line is that if you are deploying new VMs from a template you should do so from an aligned master, but VMs created from physical to virtual migrations (P2Vs) present some practical challenges and don’t have to be treated as urgently.

Recommendations

First things first. My interpretation of VMware’s stance on alignment is that they do not advocate aligning every P2V-ed VM to the VMFS due to the administrative effort, disk space requirements, potential VM down time, and in most cases a nominal VM performance increase. On the other hand, it is crystal clear that VMware does recommend always formatting VMFS LUNs with the VI Client and always taking the time to align Gold Image templates so new servers deployed will automatically be aligned.

For reference here’s VMware’s PDF on the topic:

I’ll admit my perspective as a consultant may be a bit different than the normal VI admin. After all, I am mostly involved in the Read the rest of this entry »

Virtualization can be credited for popularizing the phrase “low hanging fruit” as a referral to the set of physical servers so underutilized they are easy virtualization candidates. Now, as virtual infrastructures (VI) mature and larger, more resource intensive applications are being considered for physical to virtual (p2V) migrations, administrators and application owners need to figure out how to adapt existing VI designs to accommodate the “fruit” still left in the “tree canopy”.

Anyone who has already “harvested” their own “low hanging fruit” knows there is so much to consider. The p2v tool and process are the tip of the iceberg, change control is just below the surface, and there are many more technical challenges hidden in the depths. I’ve blogged in the past about treating the migration to VI the same as you would changing physical data centers. It’s not just server builds and operating system installs.

These same challenges experienced during the initial consolidation are still there for the rest of the bunch, but most likely on a much more public and political scale. In fact, since more times than not these same servers were left out of the first consolidation scenario as “bad virtualization candidates, it’s likely time to Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most interesting new vSphere storage features in my opinion is the new virtual disk paravirtualized SCSI (PVSCSI) controller. It has been reported that improved I/O with as much as 18% reduction in ESX 4 host CPU usage can be achieved by switching to PVSCSI. The benefits of PVSCSI performance are twofold:

• Reduced data center power and cooling costs to when you consider the impact of tens of hosts not having to work as hard
• A potential higher VM to host consolidation ratio when more CPU cycles are available

For reference, EMC virtualization guru Chad Sakac provided a post that explains the PVSCSI performance benefits:

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/05/update-on-the-io-vsphere-performance-test.html

However, to take advantage of PVSCSI a VM virtual disk configuration might need to change. Because VMware does not support PVSCSI on the operating system boot partition, VMs will need to be configured with separate virtual disks(.vmdk) for the boot drive and the data drive(s). Note that all the posts and articles referenced mention that PVSCSI works on a .vmdk containing the boot partition. It’s just that VMware officially does not support it.

So, the challenge for using PVSCSI then is to migrate services and applications that exist on VMs that contain both the boot partition and the data on a single .vmdk. Although separate boot and data partitions are the defacto standard for physical servers, the convenience of VMs has lead to a single .vmdk configuration in a lot of IT shops.

Incentive to use PVSCSI therefore actually overlaps with a shift in VM deployment strategy and ultimately supports and provides performance reasons to adopt smaller, dedicated .vmdks for boot partitions. This multi .vmdk design change also has other benefits including optimization of deduplication and DR site replication technologies.

Here are some quick thoughts on deploying and migrating VMs to a multiple .vmdk configuration. Read the rest of this entry »

After VMware P2V (physical to virtual) migrations and VMTools installs the resulting new virtual network adapters of the virtual machines (VMs) often have to be manually reconfigured because the TCP/IP settings of the source servers were not preserved. I was reading comments on a post by Scott Lowe about the process for switching vSphere VMs to use the new paravirtualized network driver (VMXNET3) as well as a new paravirtualized SCSI driver (PVSCSI) when I found the following helpful use of netsh to export and later import back TCP/IP configs explained:

From a comment by Dave O. on Scott Lowe’s post vSphere Virtual Machine Upgrade Process

“To dump the IP config using netsh from a command line:

netsh interface ip dump > c:\ipconfig.txt

Since Windows will most likely see the new NIC as “Local Area Connection 2″ (or something similar) you have to modify the above text file and change the NIC name to match the new NIC’s name. Or change the new NIC’s name on the host to match what’s in the file above. Either way works. “

Here’s a screen shot of the output of the command on my desktop. Read the rest of this entry »

VMware has released Update 4 of the VirtualCenter Management Server (also now known as vCenter). The latest Release Notes detail a couple new features, several Plug-In updates, and numerous resolved issues. The current build of ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 3 has not changed as of this post.

The following cut and pastes were taken while skimming through the release notes and highlight the changes that caught my attention.

What’s New

• Guest Operating System Customization Improvements – VirtualCenter now supports customization of Windows Server 2008 guest operating systems.
• Performance Overview Charts – VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 4 introduces the Performance Overview plug-in, which provides a single view of key performance metrics for CPU, memory, disk, and network without having to navigate through multiple charts. The aggregated charts show high-level summaries of resource distribution.

Plug-Ins Updates

This release of the VMware Infrastructure 3 software suite also includes the following:

• An update to VMware Converter Enterprise. For more information, see the VMware Converter Enterprise Update 4 for VirtualCenter 2.5 Release Notes.
• An update to VMware Update Manager. For more information, see the VMware Update Manager 1.0 Update 4 for VirtualCenter 2.5 Release Notes.
• The Performance Overview plug-in.

Two builds of VMware Infrastructure Management Installer are available for download.

• VMware-VIMSetup-2.5.0-U4-English.iso or VMware-VIMSetup-2.5.0-U4-English.zip – These files include an English-only version of the VI Client, which runs in English regardless of the language of the Windows system. Use this installer to install a VI Client that will run in English on Chinese, German or Japanese versions of the Windows operating system.
• VMware-VIMSetup-2.5.0-U4-localized.iso or VMware-VIMSetup-2.5.0-U4-localized.zip – These files include a localized installer that installs all files needed to run in English, Chinese, German, or Japanese. The VI Client used at runtime will correspond to the locale of the current Windows operating system if the locale is Chinese, German or Japanese. On Windows operating systems set to locales other than Chinese, German, or Japanese, the English version of the VI Client will be used.

I am assuming it is also recommended that you upgrade all instances of the Read the rest of this entry »