Got some exciting projects up and coming…..they are….
1) One of my consulting customers will be going to Exchange 2007. I will definitely be blogging about that transition and making notes so perhaps someone else can avoid the pitfalls I know will happen. Also want to try and setup the replication/HA features that Microsoft claims Exchange 07 can do; will be interesting to see how well it works. Both instances of Exchange will be running on my good buddy Vmware 
2) Virtualizing Shelby. With our recent push to virtualize anything/everything it just makes sense to try Shelby. Has anybody done this successfully yet? My early tests did not go well but we’ve done some equipment upgrades so perhaps better results will follow? I know reading of someone (maybe Tony Dye or Cliff Guy?) who did and suffered wicked performance issues. So if you have done it, drop me an email and let me pick your brain.
3) SAN/NAS/Storage Decision. Going back to my previous posts we are still looking into a storage solution. I am going to be ordering some more SCSI drives to pop into our secondary Vmware host just till I can get this storage issue solved. As pricing is coming back from vendors I am seeing the iSCSI SAN idea fading away; I just don’t want to try and justify that expense right now. Considering going the NAS route and just keeping all staff/media/tech files on that box and letting our 2 vmhosts run from internal storage. I’ve devised a clever (or at least I think so) way to mimic the benefit of having a SAN for failover should a physical machine die, but without actually having a SAN. What I want to do is make identical copies of every virtual machine on both hosts, leaving one in an “off” state while the other is active. My thinking is that if one box should die I could shift to the other box; grab the latest backup of data and be back up in running in under 30 minutes. For example…..we have our Shelby server image copied to both machines in a blank data state….one is production, one is backup. If primary dies I can start the backup vm, import the latest database and be good to go. Now I just need to begin testing this and see how it works. I know Windows responds well to moving servers; have had some issues with Linux…mostly with networking. Working on some sort of script that can help Linux migrate a little easier; I’ve seen something similiar on the Vmware Communities a while back.
Those are some of the latest things up and coming. Two posts in a day will be making up for close to 3 weeks without postings. Our Easter production rehearsals/programming is just ramping up and the next month will be crazy. Starting next week we have 3 rehearsals a week plus 2-3 tech. meetings. Crazy stuff, but all for the glory!
Hope all of you reading are well; good luck with your Easter productions!
4 responses so far ↓
Jason // February 29, 2008 at 2:18 pm
travis, did you know the P2V tool also will work as a V2V to make your offline copies.. I would like to figure out how to run that as a command line to automate.. but haven’t looked into it yet.
John Troyer // February 29, 2008 at 9:57 pm
Travis, I think you’re using VMware Server, right? Even so, the collection of resources at http://www.vmware.com/landing_pages/exchange_solution.html
may be useful, although they are mostly VI-related.
Clif Guy // March 1, 2008 at 1:35 am
Yes, we virtualized Shelby. Had a time of it. Finally got enough hardware horsepower under it in December. Everything is peachy now. Ping Ian Beyer, our network admin for the full deets.
Ian Beyer // March 3, 2008 at 5:57 am
What Clif said. Took us a while to fine-tune the virtual environment, but it’s rockin’ now.
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