Our Current UCS/vSphere Migration Status

We’ve migrated most of our virtual servers over to UCS and vSphere.  I’d say we are about 85% done, with this phase being completed by Aug 29.  It’s not that it’s taking 10+ days to actually do the rest of the migrations.  It’s more of a scheduling issue.  From my perspective, I have three more downtimes to go.  Not much at all.

The whole process of migrating from ESX to vSphere and updating all the virtual servers has been interesting to say the least.  We haven’t encountered any major problems; just some small items related to the VMtools/VMhardware version (4 to 7) upgrades.   For example, our basic VMTools upgrade process is to right-click on a guest in the VIC and click on the appropriate items to perform an automatic upgrade.  When it works, the guest installs VMTools, reboots,  and comes back up without admin intervention.  For some reason, this would not work for our MS Terminal Servers unless we were logged into the target terminal server.

Here’s another example, this time involving Windows Server 2008:  The automatic upgrade process wouldn’t work either.  Instead, we had to login and launch VMTools from the System Tray and select upgrade.  The only operating system that went perfectly was Windows Server 2003 with no fancy extras (terminal services, etc).  Luckily, that’s the o/s most of our virtual workloads are running.  I am going to hazard a guess and say that some of these oddities are related to our various security settings, GPOs, and the like.

All-in-all, the vm migration has gone very smoothly.  I must say that I am happy with the quality of the VMware hyerpvisor, Virtual Center, and other basic components.  There has been plenty of opportunity for something to go extremely wrong, but so far, nada. (knock on wood)

So what’s next?  We are preparing to migrate our SQL servers onto bare metal blades.  In reality, we are building new servers from scratch and installing SQL server.  The implementation of UCS has given us the opportunity to update our SQL servers to Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008.   Other planned moved include some Oracle app servers (on RedHat) as well as domain controllers, file share clusters, and maybe some tape backup servers.  This should take us into September.

Once we finish with the blades, we’ll start deploying the Cisco C-series rackmount servers.  We still have a number of instances where we have to go rackmount.   Servers in this category typically need multiple NICs, telephony boards, or other specialized expansion boards.

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