Sims.net Physical to Virtual

[itgeek]

We are thinking about moving our physical sims.net server to virtual. We currently have our san and vmware esxi. Pleasde could someone advise if they have done this and any other steps need to be taken?


Thanks

[DavidYoung]

We did this last year when we went virtual. Its quite straight-forward, and while we did get a consultant in, after seeing the process I would do it myself again.

Make sure that everyone is off SIMS (obviously), stop and disable all SQL server services so that there won't be any database changes while its being converted. Take a backup. Run VMware Converter, point it to the server and configure the VM, don't use the options to automatically switch over to the new server (as you are going to want to test it first), or the option to keep it in sync during the conversion (thats why we shut down SQL). Start it off, wait, wait, wait.... Once it has finally finished, disconnect the NIC on the old server, fire up the new VM and test everything. Follow these instructions to remove the old drivers: Clean up Virtual Machine after Physical to Virtual migration – P2V | Virtualization Tips and you should be good to go.

One note, I generally avoid p2v-ing as I prefer fresh VMs, the only reason I did it for SIMS is that I had personally built the server less than a year previous, and knew it was pretty clean, and we had software on which the vendor would charge us silly ammounts to transfer to a new box. If you can, I would re-build it from scratch and transfer the SIMS databases over, its not that hard if you don't have loads of other stuff linking into it.

Regards,
David

[Domino]

Personally, for a system like sims, I'd use the bootable vmware converter rather than the online one. Just power off the system, boot from it and run through as above. It does require you to be using a vcenter though.

The way David outlined is still fine, but it'd just make sure that the system was exactly as before.

I'd also once booted remove any hardwrae from the old server that still had a presence on the vm; see 'clean-up after power on' here Welcome to vSphere-land! » Converter Tips

[zag]

Yeh its very easy on Hyper-V also.

Just reboot and stop all services. Then use Disk2VHD.

Import the new VHD on hyper-v console and configure the networking.

Took less than 25mins for ours but I decided I prefered to keep it on the SSD drive server so we just use it as a backup now on hyper-v.