P2V Physical Server With SAN Storage

[athlon_crazy]

Dear All,

I'm going to do my first P2V for 25 of Windows machine as below :

- connecting to old SAN (IBM)

- migrate data from old SAN (IBM) to new SAN (HP)

- OS Security Harderning

- Have one machine running SAP application

My question :

- What the best approach to P2V machine which curently have SAN connectivity? Can I P2V the machine without SAN disk then later use RDM to connect to new SAN disk?

- Is there any area I need to take care for Windows with security harderning?

- How about Windows running SAP, is it advisable to P2V this machine?

- On what situation I need to choose between HOT or COLD cloning?

Really appreciate your kinda opinion.

Thanks

[IamTHEvilONE]

• What the best approach to P2V machine which curently have SAN connectivity? Can I P2V the machine without SAN disk then later use RDM to connect to new SAN disk?

I don't even think you have to clone. It's a question of where your boot drive is. If you have a system that does a Boot From SAN directly for running the os, you don't even need to do a conversion. Create a new virtual machine in ESX and provide the SAN location as the disk and it should work straight off the hop. the restriction is that ESX needs to have the disk presented to it.

If you have internal storage on the system, and an additional RDM storage ... i would disconnect the RDM storage, do the conversion, and reattach the RDM storage via ESX or VirtualCenter.

• Is there any area I need to take care for Windows with security hardening?

Same as any physical windows system. it's just done a little differently, since you don't have direct connect hardware in windows. ESX gets the RDM, then passes it through as if it was a direct attached storage to the virtual machine.

• How about Windows running SAP, is it advisable to P2V this machine?

I'm not all that familiar with SAP.

• On what situation I need to choose between HOT or COLD cloning?

If you hot clone a system, converter will grab ALL attached drives that are listed in Disk Management and attempts to convert them. This would turn an RDM into a VMDK file .... therefore it won't be an RDM after conversion. this also doesn't work all that well. If you cold clone, it can grab whatever it can see via its storage drivers. you may need to provide specific drivers for the attached storage.

Stuff that doesn't hot clone well is anything that runs high transaction or IO services. Databases, PDC, BDC, among others.

I hope that gives you a starting point,

EvilOne

1 - Check the documents

2 - Search the forums

3 - Post Question

And remember to award points to those who assist you.

[malaysiavm]

P2V with SAN connection should be fine, and I had done that previousl.

You need to choose within Hot or Cold Clone depend on the situation. if you prefer to attach as RDM later, then you may need downtime to do so.

In most cases, users are prefer to run on VMDK to simplify the way they manage the VMs. Security hardening is managed as usual, unless you are interesting to deploy some VM appliance which provide extra security features to protect your vm.

Craig

Malaysia VMware Communities -