We’re getting to the point where it’s about time to refresh our servers. Okay, actually it is time to refresh our servers. We had planned to purchase some “beefy” DL585’s (yes, that’s the AMD Opteron version), install VMware Infrastructure 3 on them, and virtualize most — but not all — of our existing servers. Unfortunately, that fell through.

With the configurations and “accessories” that we wanted and got quoted, we were a bit over what we had been funded. Unfortunately, the amount we were over is right about what the VMware portions of the cost were. So, looks like we’re not going that route after all.

Anyways… I wrote earlier about my new Linux workstation at $work. In that post, I mentioned that I have a 72GB volume mounted at /var/lib/vmware/. For those who haven’t used VMware’s free VMware Server product, that’s where it stores the virtual machine images at (by default, anyways). Since the DL580 was supposed to be a “test box” and since I’m running Gentoo on it, VMware Server is what I installed. (Besides, it beats the alternative — Virtual Server 2005 from Microsoft.)

The first virtual machine that I set up was an instance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 AS, since that’s what most of my production Linux servers are running. I had Fedora Core 5 on my previous workstation, but nothing really beats a completely identical system for testing. Now I can test applications, settings, and changes on another instance of RHEL4 before doing things on the production servers (as it should be). I haven’t actually done anything with that installation just yet, though (I just did the installation today). All I’ve done is install, register it with our RHN Satellite Server, and pull in all the applicable updates. I’ll mess with it more later.

The next thing I did was to download a copy of the VMware Converter 3.0 Beta. This utility can — among other things — take a physical server installation and convert it to an image that can be loaded and run inside of VMware Server. If we had gone the VI3 route during our server refresh, we would’ve been using this utility to create virtual machines out of our existing physical servers, so I really wanted to try it out. I looked around for a “not-so-important” server I could convert.

I finally settled on my Blackberry Enterprise Server running on top of Microsoft Windows Server 2003. I set this up about four months ago, more as a test than anything, but it’s been working so well that I’ve kept it around. The “server” that it’s running on is just an old PC, not server-class hardware. I think it’s actually a dual P3-600MHz with 512MB of RAM and a single IDE HDD — not exactly the most reliable thing in the world (comments about the reliability of my 72GB RAID0 volume will be ignored g). I’m the only one with a Blackberry, so if I kill the box it’s not really a big deal. Besides, I wanted to play with the P2V converter. =)

I installed the Converter 3.0 Beta on my XP workstation and fired it up. It was a pretty simple process which consisted of selecting the “source” (the BES server, in my case), providing administrative credentials for it, and selecting where I wanted the resulting image to go. I picked a private share on a network fileserver. I fired off the Converter and let it do it’s job. It took perhaps 45 minutes to do the conversion and I was left with the resulting image. I transferred that over to my DL580, put it in a new directory under /var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines/ and fired up my VMware Server Console.

From there it was a simple matter of “opening” the VM. I changed a few of the VM settings (set it to use a single CPU, dropped the RAM from 512MB to 256MB) and then started up the VM. When I logged in, it was going through the process of “detecting new hardware” (you know how Windows is) which took a minute or two, and that was it. The BES software had started up properly and started sending out my incoming e-mails to my Blackberry. It just worked(TM).

That was twelve hours or so ago and judging by the fact that I keep hearing the “new mail notification” on my Blackberry, I have to assume it’s still working. I’ve been a user of VMware Workstation (both on Windows and Linux) for several years and I’ve always been impressed with the quality of the software — there’s a reason why VMware is leading the virtualization industry. I don’t expect any problems to arise from running the BES server in a virtual machine as opposed to running it on a physical server.

So, what happens when my workstation goes down? Well, obviously any of the VM’s running on it will go down as well. The two that I’ve set up so far, however, are set to automatically start up when VMware Server does (which is at boot time), so whenever the DL580 boots Gentoo, Gentoo will start up VMware Server, and it will, in turn, start up the VM’s. This is going to be an interesting experiment. I’m already looking for more things I can run on this box. Though it’s not big on “horsepower” (quad 700 MHz Xeon’s), it’s got plenty of RAM (3.5GB). Since most of the instances I’d be virtualizing aren’t real CPU-intensive anyways, I think this should work out pretty well. I’ll let you know if it doesn’t.