This week I had the pleasure of advancing my “virtualization program” at work. I also got a chance to install and configure my first “real” production VMware ESXi 4.0 server. Not my first, but the first one that isn’t educational and will really get used at the office.
ESXi is what is called a “bare metal hyper visor.” Looks a lot like *nix to me, but it is definitely the bare minimum to keep things going and host virtual machines. It is also free — and I’m a big fan of free!
We have been running VMware Server 2 (also free) hosted on a Windows 2003 server for about two years now but it has been a bit sluggish of late. The hardware isn’t great — a pair of hyper-threaded Xeon 3.0 Ghz procs, 6 GB of RAM and a bunch of 7200 RPM SATA drives in RAID 1+0. More memory would’ve helped but the server is of a vintage where that old memory is actually quite expensive. This box used to be a database server and I’m pleased that it ran as well as it did. Great way to extend the usability of some old hardware, but it was time to move on.
This week a much more modern server was freed up. This one is an HP DL380 G5. Dual quad-core procs and 12 GB of RAM. A pair of 36 GB drives mirrored and 4 more 280 GB drives in RAID 1+0 — all the drives are 10 K RPM too. More cores, twice the ram and faster drives. Definitely a step up from where we’ve been. Not bad for a couple year old box.
The ESXi install was completely uneventful. I watched it draw dots on the screen for a bit, answered a few questions and watched it boot up for the first time. Slick, easy and painless.
So there I am with 4 VM’s on the older server that I want to be on the new server. How to move them? I opted to go the Converter route. I shut down each machine then pointed the converter at the files. It knew they were VMware machines from Server. Then I pointed it at the ESXi server as the target and turned it loose. It worked well enough but it took many hours to do all the VMs. I made sure my machine (running Converter) and both servers were on the same gigabit switch but that didn’t make as much difference as I had hoped.
On the second attempt I thought things would speed up if I ran Converter on the old VMware Server — the data wouldn’t have to pass through my machine (I had noticed a large amount of network traffic on my machine while running the first conversion). Unfortunately, thanks to the “large file copy issues” of Windows 2003 (see this post and last comments for more info) the server very quickly ran out of memory only about 20% into the job.
I restarted the second copy from my machine and figured I’d copy the 3rd machine to a USB drive while the second was converting. That way the third conversion would have the source files locally. Alas, doing a conversion of one while copying files for another just slowed both down too much. I sucked it up and stopped looking for shortcuts and just finished them.
After the conversions, I was a bit startled to have to reactivate the windows machines. I’ve done a fair number of physical to virtual conversions and rarely hit that issue (except when using OEM licenses on some desktops). I really didn’t expect to hit that issue at all converting from VMware Server to ESXi… Not a huge deal, just caught me by surprise.
First impressions? I should have done this years ago! I’m not the only one at the office that noticed how much faster the VMs are performing. Granted, the new hardware is definitely an upgrade, but now I’m curious if installing ESXi on that older server would’ve shown some improvements…
I see that update 1 was released yesterday. My timing was one day off.
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November 20th, 2009 
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