This week was to build and test the production VI3. Change requests for migration and planning the migrations are taken. So busy week. Some troubles to solve: New 1 Gb switch must be arranged as temporary switch before we can host production machines. Thursday: VMotion of 5 running VM’s including the Virtual Center server are be done by our project-leader Anchalee. Easy to take one ESX server in maintenance and see the running VM’s migrated to the second ESX host. Without downtime! Nice to see the console connected to the migrated Virtual Centerserver is also running.
The first production critical P2V (physical to virtual) migrations are planned for Monday. A Windows NT4 BDC and PDC with impact on IBIS.
Virtualization has impact on how to manage the servers. There are no physical servers, so in case of an emergency where to find the server? You cannot reboot the server in the old fashioned way. So before we go to production, some managing documents are written for the supportgroup. The where a lot off considerations about uptime. After we discussed the physical switches mussed be also redundant and connected to the UPS (Virtualization doesn’t change Any physical issues) we are ready for migrate.
The most servers are Windows 2000. With VMconverter we can do the migration on live running machines. Downtime is a big issue in 24×7 factories. A lot of servers are need for production processes. So we want no change before this weekend, even it is a BDC.