VMware is sweeeeeet!

So I've moved forward with VMware full swing. We purchased a new server for our production VM environment. The server specs are as follow;

HP DL580 G5
4 Quad core 3GHz Xeon cpus'
48GB memory
2 72BG 10K rpm HD
2 Qlogic HBA's
connected to our emc SAN

This server is a beast. If you didn't realize that is 16 cores in this one. I can host about 5 VM's per core for a total of 80 VM's give or take depending on resource allocation.

This server could replace pretty much all the servers on my network. And in essence I could have one rack with just this box and my SAN.......but I'm not doing that. I'm just going to consolidate our file servers and our single function servers. No need for those 1U guys anymore that just run IIS.

So why is VMware so sweet. Well b/c it's owned by emc. Really b/c the integration into your environment is almost transparent to the end users. You can literally convert a physical server that dying into a VM in a matter of hours providing you are ideally setup with a SAN and your ESX host is up and running.

Using VMware Converter (free) you can install it on the physical machine you want to convert or if that machine is out of space like most old servers are you can install it on any other server and point to converter to the server you'd like to convert. Once the VMware Converter is installed you run the app and a wizard opens up pretty much asking you what server you want to convery, what volumes (c:, d: and any others), where you'd like to house these volumes (this is best in a SAN environment where you have already carved out a LUN for this server), name change, network config and thats it. Once you hit start the physical server is still online with users connected and it takes a snapshot of the entire server files and all and turns it into a VM. Not only does it do that but it also send the VM over to the ESX host and powers it on (power on is an option if you want no downtime).

The amount of time it takes depends on how much data you will be converting. Remember the converter will be taking that physical server with everything on it that you picked into a VM. So if it's a server with a 40BG database all that has to come over. Thats takes about 2 hours. The converter has an ETA as well.

It's great. I am amazed that emc and VMware have automated this entire process.