Support of Production

[kwajalein]

In our organization we only use VMs for dev and testing purposes. One of our labs is going to be upgraded, and the site's team is planning on putting several productrion systems into virtualized environments, a departure from the dev/test-only rule.

So, in the next few months we will have production systems running on VMs for the first time.

Can anyone share any insight on gotchas with supporting production systems? At first sight I don't see any major problems, but this could reflect my lack of experience more than my depth of understanding.

Any insight would be welcome! And of course, many thanks in advance!

[MR-T]

Some ISV's are fussy about their applications running in VM's, but it's becoming more accepted now.

To be honest mostly apply the same good practices you've had with physical production servers to your virtual machines.

Ensure you have a good delegation and control of access permissions through VC and your monitoring and management solutions are well integrated.

Backups are always a must.

As you've already got a dev/test environment you'll know what works and what doesnt.

[petedr]

Agree with what you are saying, for the most part you are supporting these servers just like you need when there were physicals. Most of the organization won't even realize the server is a virtual. In our environment we started with a similar approach with development boxes first so when the move came to production everyone was very comfortable. Now almost all production servers are virtual.

[mikeddib]

The only gotcha I can think of comes more from the creation of those production VMs when you initially migrate. Are you going to be doing conversions of physical hosts or creating new VMs from scratch? The hitches we run into are mainly caused from conversions that weren't well thought out.

There are numerous posts about not using virtual SMP unless you are certain your application will need it and that's always good advice. Easier to add a virtual processor than to take one away. Also depending on the complexity of your environment and your level of ESX resource pools might be a good idea to make sure your production environment doesn't fight your dev / test boxes for resources.

Other than that you should see very few issues and as I'm sure you know and are looking forward to, management of these boxes should get easier and not harder. Best of luck.