By VSM News Staff published: Thursday, June 14 2007
Intro:
(01:29) VSM::
I have become in charge of determining the best way to consolidate the servers at the financial institution I work for. I have tested VMware's software on several standalone servers but have not converted live servers as of yet. Does HP have a tool like PlateSpin Power Convert or VMware Converter? What are the differences between them? Finally and most importantly what should I do or not do when converting?
(01:42)Answer from Lee: HP
Yes, we do have a tool; at Hp we provide a full suite of enterprise management capabilities. We have a virtual machine manager that goes across multiple virtual machine layers and we also have a server migration pack that enables you to migrate between physical and virtual servers, and also do virtual to physical as well. I think in terms of moving a ProLiant server to a virtual environment you can use tools from PlateSpin, VMware and HP to go do that, it really depends on you operational model which is going to be the most appropriate to you. If this is part of you using HP system insight manager within your environment, we have a full inventory of all the physical servers in your environment, your using our tool to manage the performance and reliability of those servers then having this tool from HP enables you to do that migration. If you are going to do this on a more standalone basis you may want to select one of the other tools. Either way you are going to end up with a excellent virtual machine platform moving to VMware on a ProLiant platform.
(03:32)VSM: Are there any gotcha’s people should consider if they are moving a HP ProLiant server into a virtual environment?
(03:39)Lee: HP
Yes certainly, the performance issues are something to look. We do work with VMware and we have some consulting capabilities to go look at your environment to understand the performance capabilities of systems, but if you know you are not using 80% of the CPU, memory or network bandwidth on your server and you have the appropriate level of resource usage to virtualize the machine, most applications should move across. There are some large databases that you probably want to avoid but HP, VMware and PlateSpin publish guidelines as to which systems are most likely to be successful and work well in a VM.
(04:37)VSM: Steven or Ben do you have anything to add
Steven :PlateSpin
A lot of PlateSpin customers are doing these types of conversions within the HP product family and are having a lot of success so I can concur with Lee’s overall assessment. We do find that the operation model is important but also that type of project and the scale of the project become more important in choosing the right tool. For smaller scale projects (10 to 50 servers) you might have more manual tolerance for some things you need to do but when converting 500 to 1000 servers you will be looking for more automation. Sometimes the network connectivity plays into it. If there is a more dispersant network that may factor into how you choose a tool.
(05:26) Ben: VMware
The only thing I would add is that VMware from a platform perspective, we are proud to have a broad ecosystem of partners, that including both PlateSpin and HP. The more that we can simplify our users experience and make conversions, or moving from physical environments to virtualized environments, the better for all our customers, better for our partner ecosystem.
(05:57)VSM: What are the differences between all the different P2V tools? Whats the best time to use PlateSpin or VM Converter.
(6:29)Steven :PlateSpin
I can start with that. Alot of the way we evolved our solution over time, in the product we call PowerConvert, is to offer organizations with a generalized workload portability technology. In the case of doing P2V it provides what we view as a highly automated, hand off mechanism of moving a workload running on a physical server into a virtual machine. It takes care of all the nuances that you may otherwise be familiar with, especially at the starting stages of the project, around how to create the virtual machine properly and how to configure it. That’s all managed by our solution, so as the project scales up, the value of a product like ours gets greater and greater because it is helping you accomplish more in an individual conversion, but also is covering more of the workflow required to take that server through its conversion phase and put it back into production witch often includes doing some testing and maybe some resyncronation after the testing and so on. The PowerConvert product, one of its key differtiantors in terms of how we sell it, is that it offers this generalized workload mobility much like HP was eluding to earlier, You can do virtual to physical migrations, physical to physical migrations, in and out of image formats and so on. It gives you a lot of different options as you build out your consolidation plan. So we have some customers who have no network connectivity, or no viable one, between the source and the destination so they might do the conversion through an imaging format then they can choose there favorite in terms of what we support in the product. That level of flexibility helps implement global consolidation programs, which is important. We can also drive the conversion from our modeling tool that lets you build up the scenarios to understand what your workloads are doing and once you’ve chosen what scenario you want to follow, then PowerCovert can be used to implement that plan right away. So you save the time within the project of jumping from the assessment to the implementation, you can go directly from assessment to implementation without having to wade though this sort of planning and transliteration phase of taking a report and using them to generate P2V jobs. There is a whole lot of functionality, better operating coverage, we provide support for both Linux and windows and product keeps expanding at all levels to deal with the customer needs.
(08:50)VSM: Ben do you want to tell us a little about VMware converter?
(08:54) Ben: VMware
Absolutely. We think P2V conversion is super important, I guess for two reasons. The first is we have a whole bunch of customers out there that want to play and try and use virtualization and these are first time virtualization user. To benefit them we have created and made available VMware Converter starter edition which is a completely free downloadable product that they can download and couple with our free VMware server product and for a cost of Zero, they can try virtualization. They can actually do a physical conversion from their physical server in their environment today, to a virtual machine and actually test that and see how it works in a virtual environment. So that is one big set of users that we think is important which is the first time users they want to try and get familiar with virtualization. The second set of users is those that want to use virtualization broadly in production. We talk to many, we have tens of thousands of customers that are already on the ESX platform and the market is really rapidly adopting ESX server, and they have come to us and asked for a simple cost effective way to move tens or hundreds of servers from a physical world to a virtual world. We also accomplish that VMware Converter enterprise edition which is licensed under our virtual center management product.
(10:15) Lee did you have anything to add?
Lee: HP
From HP perspective, I think we focus on understanding how someone is going to operationalize the virtual machine technology within their environment, so, from the tops down we have management capability that really is driving to help customers understand the business outcome that they get out of their technology. That comes from the tops down, our Open View technology is the acquisition of mercury, how we manage that entire environment. From a P2V perspective the value we offer is including that in their overall operational mode, if you are using System Insight Manager and other management tools from HP, its fits nicely into that paradigm. We also provide the deployment technology to deploy the ESX server, to deploy the host, to patch the host, to manage that full lifecycle of the virtual machine that is on the platform. Because we are a hardware vender I think as you look at the reverse of P2V, V2P of even P2P, we have some inherent capabilities there, just in terms of making sure that our platform is tremendously well supported if your end point or destination is a physical server. We do extensive testing we support all of that and the entire software stack from HP.
(11:54) So someone who is on a HP platform, You have made it easy to integrate it in with the existing tools that they are use to using.
Lee: HP
Exactly, We actually support other platforms but clearly people are going to be most able to use our tools when there in a HP ProLiant.
(12:20)How much do your tools cost? We do not “want to break the bank” for a tool we will use only once.
Lee: HP
I think the great thing about physical to virtual migration is that it is an action rather than necessarily a long term process. With HP’s technology and I’m sure the others will chip in, it a 100 dollars per migration so it’s not a tremendous outlay for something that has a tremendous amount of value to you.
(13:00) Steven: PlateSpin
A lot of what we find, in today’s market with the different teiring of options available, VMware’s free VMware converter, people getting started with their project all the way through to what we offer. The reason people and up buying the broader solution is it covers more of the problems they are trying to solve. In the scenario of doing 5 or 10, clearly you don’t want to break the bank and paying anything may be an inhibitor as Ben was saying earlier. But, if your trying to do 500 and you can save a little time on each one, because there is more automation, than it will be worth the cost. In some cases it will solve problems that are not easily solved like doing it over a slow speed network connection where the source and destination are not easily connected. The extra money in the hundred dollar range, same as HP, is very much worth the effort. We provide scaling for you products so in quantities over 5 the price will be less.
(014:16) Ben: VMware
VMware has two editions of our product. We have our Starter Edition which is the only commercially available free P2v product, and our Enterprise Edition which is licensed as part of Virtual Center which for the most part is owned by anyone who has ESX or VI3. So we decided it was important to us strategically offer the Starter Edition for free to basically create a better on ramp for people that are trying out virtualization for the first time. VMware Converter Starter Edition is a great tool when coupled with VMware Server which is our free hosted virtualization product, and then also combined those with virtual appliances which are freely downloadable programs from our virtual appliance marketplace. It will allow first time virtualization customers a way to get up to speed and running very quickly.
(15:17)VSM adds that we have recently recorded podcasts about VMware as well as PlateSpin The next question is; Does P2V work better on optimized processor like AMD Pacifica or Intel’s VT?
(016:00) Ben: VMware
In general VMware Converter is designed to work run on any processor. When doing a hot conversion (not shutting down the source server) you will have better performance and quicker conversions if there is a newer possessor in the source machine. Not required or recommended.
(16:30) Steven: PlateSpin
Nothing in our product, whether using PowerConvert for live conversion or offline conversion that is impacted by the processor.
(14:45)I have some old NT40 and Novell servers that I am afraid to touch never mind convert, am I being paranoid? (Steven Chuckles)
(16:30) Steven: PlateSpin
Bringing back something I said earlier the P is not going to be damaged, so you can continually experiment all you want to create a virtual machine with NT40 and see what you get out of it. If it doesn’t work the way you want, you’re still up with the physical server in production. The products that are out there all support 4.0 like ours and you can convert it as many times as you need to get the results you are looking for.
Lee: HP
This is a use case we see a lot of our customers using. They want to get on to a new, fully supported, hardware platform with warranties and backup. I think that it is not being paranoid but it is a reason to dip your toe into it. You will not harm the source machine as Steven said.
(18:39) Steven: PlateSpin
One more thing, A feature in PowerConvert that was requested by our service providers requested is a Project Analyzer which looks at looks at the inventory of the physical servers and determine if they are ready to be converted. Maybe there is a missing patch or unusual hardware that will cause the converting to potentially fail. We built this feature into PowerConvert so you can run the project Analysis before you start and it will help you identify servers like maybe the NT4.0 you have as a risk, so don’t bother wasting your time. It tests the systems to see if they will run in an ESX VM.
VSM adds: So half the battle is knowing whether it should be converted in the first place. Is it a good candidate?
(19:43) Steven: PlateSpin
Yes, most people find the Nt40 boxes even thought they may have a high level of utilization, there probably on older boxes and good examples of what could go into a virtual machine.
