On Jul 18, 2011, at 11:16 AM, Derek J. Balling wrote: > Has anyone here done an ESX->XenServer migration before? Tips? Tricks? > Gotchas? Tools that you used that you said "Holy crap that made everything > easy!"?
I've done a physical -> XenServer 5.6 migration for a number of hosts, and from the guest OS's standpoint a migration from VMware is effectively the same as one from physical. The only difference is that you'd need to disable or remove VMware Tools. The biggest gotcha is that XenServer wants Linux guests to be paravirtualized, which means that you have to prepare a compatible kernel prior to the migration. Depending on your Linux distributions, this may already be in place or may just be a quick package install away. Also be aware that XenServer is quite sensitive to your Linux distribution. If the one you're using isn't on their supported list, life is going to be much harder than it was under VMware. You *can* run Linux fully virtualized under XenServer like you do now with VMware, but you lose the ability to do basic stuff like live migration, as well as most insight into guest performance metrics. This may be different in 6.0, but I haven't had time to play with the beta yet. Otherwise, there's a basic list of guest prep work to be done: - Install a Xen friendly kernel (see above) - Replace any explicit /dev/sdX naming in fstab (or replace with labels or use LVM) - Prep a new initrd if necessary - Adjust grub.conf and /etc/inittab to ensure they're configured to use Xen's xvc0 console Once you have the guests prepped, there are a lot of options for getting your data over to a new XenServer container, ranging from rsync to dd to VMDK -> VHD conversion utilities. Play with all the options and determine which works best given your current environment, availability of maintenance windows, and destination storage type. I'm sure some of the commercial P2V/V2V utilities can do this for you on the fly, but most tend to favor Windows environments because they typically need more help. Also consider whether it's possible to simply re-deploy new guest VMs under Xen and migrate just services and data over. This is where good Linux "DevOps" administration practices and application-level balancing and failover become *really* handy. Good luck, and let us know how your evaluation goes! _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
