Vpshere and SBS 2008

[InlandTech]

Our company just purchased vsphere essentials plus, and 2 new Dell poweredge r700 servers to virtualise our 6 physical servers.

I justI have 2 questions:

1) Is microsoft sbs2008 a supported gust on vsphere4?

2) In any vsphere essentials plus installation, does it require that a domain controller be a physical server? ie when you install vsphere host it asks for dns and host details, in which case is it safe to say that you can never have a 100% virtualised environment? ie you will always need to have a physical server for vcenter to be installed on to manage the vsphere4 hosts?

At the moment we have a sbs2003 domain controller which also includes exchange and sql and sharepoint. We have 4 other application servers, and 1 server which is running esxi3.5 with 4x windows servers and 2 ubuntu servers. I am just considering all the different upgrade paths. We have bought sbs 2008 and licenses to upgrade all the 2003 and 2000 servers to 2008 std edition. I'm not sure whether to do these upgrades before or after they are converted p2v.

Thanks,

Daniel.

[dcoz]

SBS 2008 is supported.

You can check by searching the compatibility database. http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php

The vcenter doesnt require a physical DC. I have ran DCs as VMs without issue many times. The one thing i would watch is about time source. I usually choose to have the VMs point to a DC for the time source, and have the DC come off a time source like a router, which is pointing to an Internet time source. You can then point your ESX hosts to the same network device as the DC.

Regarding having vcenter4 run as a VM or physical machine, then its purely down to how comfortable you are about having the management server running on the enviroment you are managing.

There are benefits to running vc as a vm such as, snapshots, image level backups etc, but you have to be aware of things like moving VC to other hosts when performing upgrades. Its your choice really. There are lots of discussions in the forums about this.

In terms of your upgrades, i always like to start with fresh builds, and where possible, migrate the app or data to the new server. The VMs you have running on the ESX3.5i host just use converter and migrate them. (but before you do check to make sure they are still supported) There should be no issues at all with them.

Hope this helps

DC

[InlandTech]

Thanks for the response dcoz. Just another question...

I just read the numerous blogs and discussions on running vcenter in a virtual machine. It's not possible to view the console of a virtual machine on a vsphere host is it? ie you can't run the vpshere client on a vshere host? I'm just considering how do most people setup there servers to be able to work in the server room? If there was a physical server running the vsphere client, then you can just toggle the kvm switch to view the console of that server.

One other question, what is considered best practise for offsite backups? Can the vsphere host talk to an scsi lto tape drive? Are backups done in the virtual machine, in which case the vm running the backup software would have to be configured in a way to always be on the host that is connected to the tape drive. I have also heard of veeam being a good backup solution?

In regards to converting the existing esxi3.5 clients - why does the converter need to be used, as they are already VMs. Can't the esxi host just be added to vcenter and transfer from one host to another?

I'm looking at doing the install, manage, configure course in the next month so hopefully will have a better understanding of these things soon.

Thanks,

Daniel.

[danm66]

In regards to your question about running the vSphere client... Most people install it onto their windows workstation and log into their VC remotely through the client. Alternatively, RDP into the vCenter server and run the client on the VC, but why add the extra complexity of going through another connection???

As far as going completely virtual... I would be hesitant to recommend to any company that they virtualize everything if they only have 2 ESX hosts unless you have redundancy built into your SAN. If you do go all virtual, keep a backup of the most critical systems on local storage or have thoroughly tested the ability to quickly restore to it. That way, if your SAN goes down, you can get the critical systems running on local storage until the SAN is available. Also, keep in mind that ESX (since it's founded on Linux) likes stable and up to date DNS servers, so you might want to use IP addresses instead of hostnames when referencing other systems during setup of your systems. Speaking of DNS, if you virtualize all of your DNS servers and you have to shut down all VM's or they crash, you will probably lose internet connectivity so plan a contingency for that, too. (a couple of lessons learned from the trenches)

I'll let somebody else tackle the backup questions...