Physical to Virtual Planning

[RabbieBurns]

Im about to start planning my p2v of servers, but Im not entirely sure what specs to give the new VMs. Im not able to do an actual P2V using SCVMM as I will be moving services off old 2003 servers to new 2008R2 machines, so most will be rebuilds.

But at the moment our current servers are vastly overspecced (24gb ram on a file server, 16gb ram for a box running oliver, etc). So obviously Im not going to be needing to provision anything like that for the virtual servers, but the question is, what would be a good spec.

Is there an agent or something I can run on the servers over a month to log Memory and CPU averages to give me a rough idea of what they are actually using?

And also with regards to virtual processors, each of our servers has 24 cores, how many virtual processors should each VM get?

Cheers

[TheMinister]

What virtual platform are you moving your physical servers to?

[RabbieBurns]

hyperV

[Domino]

Honestly mate the best thing I've found is to allocate a minimum and boost as needed.

Obviously for some things (email, etc) you'll need more to start with, but for most of our builds now we issue 2xvcpus, 4gb of RAM and work upward.

we use VMWare which gives quite detailed specs of what the machines actually using - I'm sure HyperV can do something similar.

-However, if you did wanna monitor the servers usage, maybe the server performance advisor could help?
Download details: Microsoft ® Windows Server

[RabbieBurns]

Honestly mate the best thing I've found is to allocate a minimum and boost as needed.

Obviously for some things (email, etc) you'll need more to start with, but for most of our builds now we issue 2xvcpus, 4gb of RAM and work upward.

we use VMWare which gives quite detailed specs of what the machines actually using - I'm sure HyperV can do something similar.

-However, if you did wanna monitor the servers usage, maybe the server performance advisor could help?
Download details: Microsoft ® Windows Server

awesome i think that tool is exactly what I was hoping for thanks

Yeah at the moment I'm just using the dynamic RAM and setting them with 512mb start with 4gb available so will see how that goes.

[RabbieBurns]

@Domino I cant seem to figure out if that tool will let me do historical monitoring, it seems to just run and give results.

Im after something I can run for like a fortnight and get a overview of average resources used. Can this do it? Or do I need to look for a 3rd party?

[mrbios]

DCs on 2008R2: 1GB ram, 1 CPU (give it 2GB while you install, after that knock it back so lon as all it's doing is dhcp, dns, AD etc.) and 2003R2 DCs are normally happy with 512mb ram.
Exchange 2010: 4GB + 5mb per mailbox, personally given mine 4CPUs but that's possibly overkill.
SQL server: at least 2 CPUs and min of 4GB ram - dependent on SQL server size though really, ours has 6GB ram and 2 CPUs runs a treat with lots of databases
linux proxys: 512mb and 1CPU is generally enough for any squid server etc most linux boxes don't need alot
ISA server: 2GB ram and 1 or 2 CPUs dependent on school size

Any reason you went with hyperV? vmware is miles better

Just about to get vmotion going this summer Can't wait!!!

[Domino]

@Domino I cant seem to figure out if that tool will let me do historical monitoring, it seems to just run and give results.

Im after something I can run for like a fortnight and get a overview of average resources used. Can this do it? Or do I need to look for a 3rd party?

You'll only really get minutes worth of data at a time, rather than constant - but you can launch it from the cmd line, maybe batch it to run once an hour for a couple of days - then collate the results?

Server Performance Advisor (SPA) for Windows Server 2003

[RabbieBurns]

Any reason you went with hyperV? vmware is miles better

2008R2 Datacenter is inclusded in our licensing.

VMWare is not.