How to Compress Time Needed for Conversions

[mcsenerd]

Hello all,

This is my first post here. We are in the middle of a major consolidation effort at my workplace. We currently have an infrastructure utilizing ESX 3.0.2 Update 1 Hosts and we are using VC 2.0.2 Update 3 to manage them. We have already converted over 100 physical machines using the latest edition of the converter, but we began our effort with some of the lowest impact machines in our data center and now we're moving into converting more of our "heavy hitters" and high visibility servers. This has given rise to a discussion about how we could best compress our schedule when it comes to converting these machines. Currently we are requiring our application owners to be prepared for their applications to be unavailable for use anywhere between 4 and 8 hours. However...we have had many of our previous conversions go plenty past this time period (large drives, slow networks, conversion issues...all sort of causes for this). Many of the servers we are preparing to convert in the coming weeks have large data stores on volumes other than C: that I'm sure are going to seriously impact the time that it will take to convert them. So...basically all of this information only serves to preface this question:

Are there any best practices for possibly pre-staging data copies prior to a conversion? Such as possibly pre-creating a VMDK and then using a helper VM to robocopy (or insert your favorite utility here) the data to said vmdk ahead of actual conversion time? Any suggestions and/or best practice-type recommendations will be greatly appreciated!

[rriva]

YES

You could create a disk, attach it to another VM and use a copy tool to keep synchronized to the disk.

When you convert the machine you must convert only system disk (usually C:), shutdown both VM (the newly converted one and the one who have the disk attached) and simply change the disk owner.

For best practice, I'll suggest you to make a cold clone of the system and stop all services before running the last synchro between the two disk.

So :

1. create a new disk and attach it to an existing VM

2. copy (and keep snchronized) all adata between this disk and the machine you have to convert

3. stop all services and application writing on that disk on the original machine

4. do the last synchro

5. cold clone the machine

6. shutdown the helper VM

7. detach from the disk from the helper vm

8. attach the disk to the newly converted machine

9. startup the converted machine

Hope to be clear

Riccardo Riva

If you found this or other information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thank You!