I work as a unix/vmware consultant for a company in the midwest where every client wants to give me an XP notebook with their special-sauce VPN software installed. I accept the laptop and immediately P2V it using VMware's Converter, then import the VMDK files into Parallels and run the clients system on my MacBook. Lately I've been eyeing an iMac... and you guessed it, how can I run the client's VM on the iMac in the morning at home, and then run to a cafe in the afternoon with my MacBook? The only thing I can think of is bastardizing a DR tool such as DoubleTake. Has anyone tried this? How well does it work?
The poster wants alternatives, not damage control.
Here's my wish... A Wikisync Virtual Machine Appliance. It doesn't exist yet, but here's how it would work.
You download a 70MB virtual machine and start it up, then onfigure it to point to a master wiki at your business. Everyone can contribute to their own local copy (offline or on), and it will sync with the master wiki when available. But, there's more, you can "share" (SMB) a local directory on your Mac/PC/Linux box to the VM and it will rsync files from the parent wiki/file-server as well (ala groove). If you could integrate this file-sharing into the wiki interface, you could either modify files directly on the fs and the appliance would sync, or you could get notifications through the web-interface (which is always pointing to your local copy for speed/security reasons).
I'm certified for both VMware ESX 2.5 and VMware VI3. VMware's best practices are to never use a single path, whether it be for NIC or FC HBA (storage). VMware also has Virtual Switches, which not only allows you to team NICs for load balancing and failover, but also use port groups (VLANs). You can then view pretty throughput graphs for either physical NICs or virtual adapters. It's crazy amazing(TM).
As for "putting many workloads on a box and uptime," this writer should really take a look at VMware VI3 and Vmotion. Not only can you migrate a running VM without downtime, you can "enter maintenance mode" on a physical host, and using DRS (distributed resource scheduler) it will automatically migrate the VMs to hosts and achieve a load balance between CPU/Memory. It's crazy amazing(TM).
Lastly, just to toot a bit of the virtualization horn... VMware's HA will automatically restart your VMs on other physical hosts in your HA cluster. It's not unusual for a Win2k3 VM to boot in under 20 seconds (VMware's BIOS posts in about.5 seconds compared to an IBM xSeries 3850 which takes 6 minutes). Oh, and there is the whole snapshotting feature, memory and disk, which allows for point in time recovery on any host. Yea... downsides indeed.
Virtualization is Sysadmin Utopia. -- cvl, a Virtualization Consultant
This is not P2V. VMware Converter is the successor to VMware P2V.
VMware Converter is absolutely free at this point, with just a few little bugs, and a few missing features. Once officially released it will come bundled with a VMware VirtualCenter license, or free but with a limited feature set.
In my experience BartBE and Ghost is a last resort for P2Vs. The converter tool will not only replace the drivers so there is no "New Hardware Found" caveats, but it also has the option to configure the new machine's identity using sysprep.
If you're looking to spend money on a good P2V tool, check out PlateSpin PowerConvert.
Next year much of the server and desktop hardware we run will need replacing. Migrate your servers to virtual machines. You can do this for free using Cent OS as the host, and VMware Server (free) software to run virtual machines. The VMware Converter (now in beta) will allow you to p2v, or migrate physical-to-virtual machines and this is done while the source server is powered on. So, regardless if you're going to Linux right now, you can make the jump to hardware-agnostic VMs with just a few clicks, and no extra money spent. Right away, you'll gain flexibility by utilizing your new hardware more efficiently.
Good luck!
As a VPC/LPIC (VMware Certified Professional, Linux Professional Certified) consider using a blade solution from IBM or DELL with VMware VIN (Virtual Infrastructure Node) installed to keep your server OS installations abstracted from hardware. Use RHEL as your guest OS, which will run your specific software applications.
I'd be more than happy to consult a large-scale VM installation.
I did a 6-day bootcamp style training session with TrainingCamp. I successfully attained my LPIC-1. Out of the 6 people in my class 2 (including myself) had previous Linux experience and we both passed, the others failed. However, having many coworkers and friends that are teaching themselves linux, this would have given them one of the best starting points around. Highly recommended no matter what your skill level.
Stick with RedHat and purchase the licenses or move to something w/out that "disability." In the end, we chose Debian. It's worked so well for us. We have a strong LDAP infrastructure on Dell servers and we've documented everything in our own TWiki.
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I work as a unix/vmware consultant for a company in the midwest where every client wants to give me an XP notebook with their special-sauce VPN software installed. I accept the laptop and immediately P2V it using VMware's Converter, then import the VMDK files into Parallels and run the clients system on my MacBook. Lately I've been eyeing an iMac... and you guessed it, how can I run the client's VM on the iMac in the morning at home, and then run to a cafe in the afternoon with my MacBook? The only thing I can think of is bastardizing a DR tool such as DoubleTake. Has anyone tried this? How well does it work?
The poster wants alternatives, not damage control.
Here's my wish... A Wikisync Virtual Machine Appliance. It doesn't exist yet, but here's how it would work.
You download a 70MB virtual machine and start it up, then onfigure it to point to a master wiki at your business. Everyone can contribute to their own local copy (offline or on), and it will sync with the master wiki when available. But, there's more, you can "share" (SMB) a local directory on your Mac/PC/Linux box to the VM and it will rsync files from the parent wiki/file-server as well (ala groove). If you could integrate this file-sharing into the wiki interface, you could either modify files directly on the fs and the appliance would sync, or you could get notifications through the web-interface (which is always pointing to your local copy for speed/security reasons).
Whatcha think?
I'm certified for both VMware ESX 2.5 and VMware VI3. VMware's best practices are to never use a single path, whether it be for NIC or FC HBA (storage). VMware also has Virtual Switches, which not only allows you to team NICs for load balancing and failover, but also use port groups (VLANs). You can then view pretty throughput graphs for either physical NICs or virtual adapters. It's crazy amazing(TM).
.5 seconds compared to an IBM xSeries 3850 which takes 6 minutes). Oh, and there is the whole snapshotting feature, memory and disk, which allows for point in time recovery on any host. Yea... downsides indeed.
As for "putting many workloads on a box and uptime," this writer should really take a look at VMware VI3 and Vmotion. Not only can you migrate a running VM without downtime, you can "enter maintenance mode" on a physical host, and using DRS (distributed resource scheduler) it will automatically migrate the VMs to hosts and achieve a load balance between CPU/Memory. It's crazy amazing(TM).
Lastly, just to toot a bit of the virtualization horn... VMware's HA will automatically restart your VMs on other physical hosts in your HA cluster. It's not unusual for a Win2k3 VM to boot in under 20 seconds (VMware's BIOS posts in about
Virtualization is Sysadmin Utopia. -- cvl, a Virtualization Consultant
This is not P2V. VMware Converter is the successor to VMware P2V. VMware Converter is absolutely free at this point, with just a few little bugs, and a few missing features. Once officially released it will come bundled with a VMware VirtualCenter license, or free but with a limited feature set. In my experience BartBE and Ghost is a last resort for P2Vs. The converter tool will not only replace the drivers so there is no "New Hardware Found" caveats, but it also has the option to configure the new machine's identity using sysprep. If you're looking to spend money on a good P2V tool, check out PlateSpin PowerConvert.
As a VPC/LPIC (VMware Certified Professional, Linux Professional Certified) consider using a blade solution from IBM or DELL with VMware VIN (Virtual Infrastructure Node) installed to keep your server OS installations abstracted from hardware. Use RHEL as your guest OS, which will run your specific software applications.
I'd be more than happy to consult a large-scale VM installation.
./starsearch.pl | mail -s "You have a new black hole!" space-folk
No. http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=2559
I did a 6-day bootcamp style training session with TrainingCamp. I successfully attained my LPIC-1. Out of the 6 people in my class 2 (including myself) had previous Linux experience and we both passed, the others failed. However, having many coworkers and friends that are teaching themselves linux, this would have given them one of the best starting points around. Highly recommended no matter what your skill level.
12 months ago I had to make a choice...
Stick with RedHat and purchase the licenses or move to something w/out that "disability." In the end, we chose Debian. It's worked so well for us. We have a strong LDAP infrastructure on Dell servers and we've documented everything in our own TWiki.
We've successfully moved from RedHat to Debian stable. We've documented our entire experience. We use all Dell Poweredge Servers.
Real-life Migration