Re: [Veritas-bu] Converting physical Linux master to virtual

I was able to duplicate my Windows master server as a VM with no problems and even to see some tape drives, but even now with vSphere ESX 4.0, you should be able to do Direct Path I/O, then you can assign physical HBAs to VMs. If you just replicate the Catalog data and you don't need to have any tape devices attached, then you should be fine with a VM. I use DoubleTake though for replication and physical host to physical for the master servers, but I use DT for other systems physical to vm and vm to vm with the fail over option, it works quite well, I recommend this solution. It covers though Windows and Linux systems, but not any other UNIX flavors.

Boris

On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 9:25 PM, Dean <dean.deano AT gmail DOT com> wrote:

Thanks guys.

Just to clarify, we have no intention of doing any backups to the master server, either to disk or tape. All of the backups will be performed by physical media servers.

Having said that, I haven't really thought about catalog backups yet.

Luckily I will have a chance to test this to a certain extent next week as we are performing a DR test, and are going to attempt to rebuild the physical master as a VM at the recovery site. I'll report back here on how it goes!

Regards

Dean

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 11:00 AM, Ed Wilts <ewilts AT ewilts DOT org> wrote:

On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 4:03 PM, Dean <dean.deano AT gmail DOT com> wrote:

Mark's post about converting a standalone master to clustered prompted me to post this.

Our current master server is standalone, physical, RHEL4, NBU 6.5.3.

Since Symantec will now support virtual master servers, we're planning to convert it to a virtualised host running under VMware. The main reason we want to do this is to simplify DR.

Virtual master servers are supported, but don't expect fast disk. We have an open ticket for sucky disk performance with VMware at the moment that they've duplicated. If we install Win2008 on the bare metal, we can push over 100MB/sec to disk. Put a Win2008 guest in ESX on the same hardware and the disk I/O tops out at about 30MB/sec.

Your idea is a good one (in theory), but be very cautious about performance along the way.

.../Ed

Ed Wilts, RHCE, BCFP, BCSD, SCSP, SCSE
ewilts AT ewilts DOT org

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