Novell GroupWise on VMWare

[mraymus]

I'm on a large project where there are 20 large post offices, 200Gigs or more each, running on NetWare in a clustered environment. We've been tasked with moving this same environment to VMWare. Here's our configuration:

6 3950 M2 IBM X Series servers (high end)

128 Gigs of memory in each server

4 CPUs, 24 Cores per server

SAN: IBM XIV, Tier 2 storage

Switches:

CISCO 9516 SAN Switches

4 Gig for SAN connectivity

NetWare 6.5 SP8

GW703

2 16 node clusters

Running this all on a 6 node, VSphere 4 Update 1 Cluster

We're disabling DRS on the NetWare Guest OS, so failover is being handled by HA and the Novell Cluster rather than VMWare

We're hearing rumblings about NetWare not being fully supported in this environnment. And we're also hearing feedback that says, "Don't use VMWare of handling relationship databases larger than 50Gigs. GroupWise is a relational database that is more than 200Gigs in size. Lots and lots of I/O.

Does anybody foresee any issues with this project? Does VMWare support an environment like this?

Matt

[Braumin]

We are running GroupWise 7.0.3 right now on a DRS cluster with no issues at all, however when we moved to VMware last year we took the oportunity to migrate our Netware servers to OES2 SP1 on SLES10 SP2. If you are serious about going to VMware I would definately look into that.

VMware does support Netware, but I believe (and I am having trouble verifying this right now) that Netware is limited to 1 CPU.

You should be able to migrate your post offices to OES2 using the Novell GroupWise Migration utility. We used it and it was pretty flawless.

[mraymus]

Thanks for the reply. Yeah, I recommended they go to LINUX as well, but this project was scoped and the decision made before I got involved, so I'm trying to clean up a little. We're going to NetWare and I want to make sure it works as well as possible. Someone mentioned that if you get relational dbs bigger than 80 Gigs you're gonna have problem. With our 200 Gig Post Offices, we far exceed that. Not to mention that GroupWise is so I/O intensive.

We've been able to get around the single CPU issue by choosing Other, Guest 32 Bit OS, changing the CPUs to 4, and then changing the OS back to Netware. The 4 CPUs stick even though you can't change it.

I've actually done lots of migrations of GroupWise to LINUX, but that's outside the scope for this project.

Matt

[mraymus]

Also, note that after further testing, using 4 CPUs by faking VMWare out (choosing Guest OS, 32-bit, change the CPUs to 4, and then change the OS back to Netware) does not work. It sends the performance charts on the vsphere environment through the roof as far as cpu utilization goes.

I wish VMWare supported multiple cpus with NetWare.

Matt

[Braumin]

You have to install VMware Tools on Netware otherwise the CPU will always be at 100%. Netware does not throttle by default. You can try that out.

[mraymus]

VMWare Tools is installed already. If we use 1 CPU, the perf charts show 0-5%. If we put in 4 CPUs, it pegs at 100%. On every guest.

Matt