Netware 6.5 capacity planning

[jonhutchings]

Has anyone any significant real world experience of virtualizing large numbers of NetWare 6.5 servers?

I'm especially interested in any tools used for capacity planning with NetWare, since I'm looking at many 10's of servers some automation along the lines of the VMware capacity planner would be useful

[bowulf]

We have virtualized over 25 Netware 6.5 servers, so I am not sure we count as "large numbers." We used NRM and its performance monitoring to our capacity planning beforehand. We briefly looked at Uptime software to gather though the reports you are looking for. It had the data consolidation and one stop point for performance metrics.

[kreischl]

Are these special purpose netware servers or do they act as a file server? We have one netware server virtualized and can't decide if we want to virtualize the two remaining servers. One is student file serving and the other is administrative. Student might have 150 connections and the administrative might have 400.

[bowulf]

Some of them are file servers for branch offices (top # of users is about 100-125 users). Our main production file server cluster machines are still physical as well since Netware clustering isn't supported at least publicly.

[derekn]

We are also in the process of converting our two main production Novell groupwise and file/print servers to vm. My question is how are you doing backup and file restore? We are trying to avoid backing up to tape, but we have not found a solution that allows disk backup along with file restore....similar to CA's Brightstor product, only for disk instead of tape.

Any ideas?

[dawho9]

We have over 30 NetWare 6.5 servers virtualized right now with no problems. The vast majority are for printing, with some IDM, iChain, file access thrown in there.

As for backup/restore, whatever you are using now for an Agent should be fine for a file level backup option. We use CommVault with no issues and VCB for "system" backup.

The only thing I would say about NetWare virtualized is that even when idle it takes up lots of ram. 95% of the netware servers in VM are allocated 2GB of RAM. When sitting idle, like they are now with school out, they still eat over 1GB of ram. On the flip side, a couple of our idle Windows box sit closer to 250MB of ram when idle.

Just something to be aware of when it comes to sizing that I have ran into.

Richard

[Craiger862]

Are you guys talking about OES 6.5 on Linux kernel or Netware kernel? If they're Linux kernel, capacity planning should be possible with VMWare capacity planner tool. If they're Netware kernel though, is there an agent based or agent-less option that can collect performance data and give P2V capacity planning recommendations?

[savantsingh]

Hi,

You could use Platespin Recon for capacity planning of Netware. Its a bit tricky to get it working, but let me know if you face any issues.

I recently did a project where we migrated some Netware servers and converted some to SLES.

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[lanamarkinc]

Lanamark Suite Services Edition was recently used to profile and plan virtualization of several hundred NetWare servers (mostly 6.5).