V2V from Hyper-V to VMware ESXi

So you finally came to the realization that Microsoft Hyper-V really isn't as mature as you were lead to believe. Good! You can attend the Gullible Anonymous meetings later. First, let's get you over to something that can keep your servers up and running and performing like the $10k you spent on your hardware should provide you.

Assuming that you have a free server available, doing a V2V from Hyper-V to VMware ESXi is extremely easy. Just think of this as doing a P2V, and ignore the wasted resources in between...

Take one of your spare servers, and load up VMware ESXi on it (you can do 4.1 or 5, or whatever strikes your fancy). Get it all ready for the VM to run on it, and get it on the same network and gig switch as your Hyper-V box.

Login to the VM that you want to convert, and download and install VMware's Standalone Converter on it (current version is 5.0). Current supported platforms are:

Windows XP Professional (32-bit and 64-bit)

Windows Server 2003 SP2, R2 (32-bit and 64-bit)

Windows Vista (32-bit and 64-bit)

Windows Server 2008 (32-bit and 64-bit)

Windows Server 2008 R2 (64-bit)

Windows 7 (32-bit and 64-bit)

Next, you will want to run the Converter against the local machine, and convert it to ESXi server that you just created. There are several settings to change to verify that it's done properly:

• Prep your computer for a P2V by stopping ALL unneccessary services. You only need core services to make sure that it's successful.
• Select Powered-on machine; local machine

• Put in the IP/Hostname of your new ESXi server and root/password

• Give it a destination Virtual Machine name
• Select a Resource Pool (if used), datastore, and Virtual Machine hardware version (unless you have a driving reason, go with Version 7)
• Set your disk drives the way that you want them to be on the new environment - I prefer Thin on all my disks, but it's up to you and your application. To change this, Edit the "Data to copy," Advanced, and Destination Layout tab. Change the type to Thin

• Change the Disk controller to SCSI. To change this, Edit the "Devices" and go to the Other tab. I typically select SCSI LSI Logic SAS for newer OSes and SCSI LSI Logic for older OSes.

• Set all services that say Hyper-V to disabled. To do this, Edit the "Services" and go to the Destination services tab. The ones I came across on my most recent migration were (your mileage may vary based on the version/options you have):
• Hyper-V Heartbeat Service
• Hyper-V Data Exchange Service
• Hyper-V Guest Shutdown Service
• Hyper-V Time Synchronization Service
• Hyper-V Volume Shadow Copy Requestor
• Edit Advanced options and go to the Post-conversion tab and check "Install VMware Tools on the destination virtual machine"

Off it goes converting. Once it's done, power down your Hyper-V VM, power up the VMware VM, and wait for the VMware Tools to install. Once that's done, uninstall the VMware Converter, and your off and running.

Now you can wipe your Hyper-V server, load up ESXi on it, and build yourself a nice little redundant cluster.

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Dustin Shaw
VCP

Speed, Speed, Speed

Who would've ever thought you'd see network performance like this on an Windows box:

This is the networking graph I got off of a physical box running the inital push for Quest vConverter's Continuous Protection option. The blip in the middle was it switching from the C: volume to the D: volume. It just about knocked my socks off - I've never seen anything eat up the entire NIC on Windows.

I found out some really cool stuff with vConverter. With the Continuous Protection option, you can keep a full-image copy of your physical server on an NTFS Share, ESX(i) Server, or Hyper-V server. After the first push, it just copies block (or file level) changes (whichever option you want) to the target store. This way, if you ever lose your physical box, you can either immediately pop it online in your ESX/Hyper-V box, or do a V2P back to your original hardware once it's back up and running. Very cool stuff.

Even cooler - let's say you're looking at Offsite DR. You already have Virtual Servers (VMware or Microsoft) in a hardened data center, and are currently replicating your VMs at your main office offsite to there. Good for you! Now how do you push your physical boxes out there?

With vConverter, you can do your initial copy locally (say to an NTFS Share on a NAS device), then you can take it to your Datacenter, and upload it to your SAN that your ESX or Hyper-V boxes use. Then go into vConverter, do a "change target" and select your ESX or Hyper-V box, tell it where the data is, and your good to go. Now all you have to worry about getting across the WAN is your block changes. Now you really do have an Offsite DR solution.

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Dustin Shaw

VCP

vFoglight 6.5 is out

Quest vFoglight 6.5 was released today and is available for download from Quest's site.

For those who aren't familiar, vFoglight is Performance Management software for Virtual Environments (both VMware and Hyper-V).

Here's a breakdown of the new features available in vFoglight 6.5, as highlighed by Ben Scheerer:

Release Highlights
With Version 6.5, Quest vFoglight is focused on addressing specific virtual management needs by:

• Reducing time and effort required to manage and fix problems in the virtual infrastructure through built-in automation, workflow based alert remediation and in-context administration
• Easily presented user centric views “perspectives” that provides a single view giving a complete understanding of the infrastructure status 
• Leveraging additional hypervisor technologies to more seamlessly fit into existing virtualized environments

vFoglight v6.5 includes new and improved capabilities across performance monitoring, administration, remediation, capacity planning, chargeback, and service management in a single, downloadable solution.

• Only to offer a unique visual paradigm using color coding and movement to direct administrators to problem areas
• Reduces time and effort required to manage the virtual infrastructure through built-in automation, workflow based alert remediation and in context administration
• Capacity planning capabilities quickly identifies bottlenecks, predict capacity failures, provide scenario models and identifies candidates for optimization
• Understand how the infrastructure is supporting key applications and business services including the ability to associate costs for the use of infrastructure
• Supports heterogeneous hypervisor platforms including VMware and Hyper-V
• New support for Exchange Server 2010 (Foglight for Exchange)

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Dustin Shaw
VCP

All About the Design

It seems to me that you can always tell if an IT guy is worth his water by the way that he architects/designs solutions.

We picked up a small shop recently that their previous guy built them a heavy-built Dell T710 with Microsoft Hyper-V. They've got 5 VMs running on it, so nothing wrong with the basic idea behind it, but the execution is where I have an issue.

The machine was originally built (from factory) with the onboard SAS 6/iR RAID card with a set of four 450GB drives in a RAID 5 config. No hot spares. Issue number one.

He realized that he must have under built, so he then went off the deep end. He went out to NewEgg and bought four 2TB SATA drives, bought the caddies off EBay, and bought a PERC 6/i RAID controller directly from Dell (must've not found it cheaper somewhere else). This means the factory warranty from Dell (3 year NBD onsite) won't extend to anything except the RAID card. What's the most likely thing to die on a server again?

He then went in and reconfigured the machine to run off the PERC with a second RAID 5 set with the 2TB drives (again no hot spare), and directly attached one of the VMs to it for their main data storage. This is all fine and dandy, except for the fact that there is 800GB free on the first RAID set, and they are only (at this point) using 40GB on the second RAID set (leaving roughly ALL of it free).

And here comes the second part of the issue - much bigger than the previous config issues.

The PERC 6/i controller has issues running on drives 1.5TB and up. The latest firmware revision runs better than the previous one, but the controller is regularly (it's happened 3 times in a month, hence why the old guy went bye-bye) dropping a drive offline. Part of the issue is that when it drops the drive, it drops the RAID set offline at the same time.

When I got called in, the RAID set had dropped two drives offline (meaning bad, bad things could've happened to their data). I reseated the "bad" drive, imported the foreign config, and let the RAID set rebuild itself. I then proceeded to move their data off of that RAID set and remove the config from the environment.

They still have 800GB to grow into before we even need to consider doing anything. My first plan of order is to tell them that they need to get another 450GB drive and put it in as a hot spare. As I mentioned, this is a small shop, and the server sits on the floor in a closet. They only open the door when there is a problem, so they could easily loose a drive and not know it until someone asks "What's that red light for? It's been doing that for a month." Hence the driving need for a hot spare.

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Dustin Shaw
VCP