P2V and V2V to AHV

Hi ,

can you provide more info, please?

• What is source hypervisor?
• How many VMs
• what is the tolarable downtime for application
• operating system

thanks
Artur

Hi ,

sorry for the late update.
As for now, I want to Physical to Virtual (P2V) scenario.

Currently, user has 7 stand-alone physical servers and 1 virtual:
1 x Linux Ubuntu 7.10
1 x Linux RedHat 4.2
3 x Windows Server 2003 Std
1 x OpenSuse 11.2
1 x Linux Ubuntu 14.04

Virtual Server running in Proxmox
1 x Linux Ubuntu 14.04

They are planning to migrate all servers to AHV. they can tolerate downtime 3-4 hours.

Hi 

As Artur said, once you get the server workload into a Virtual machine, the process is very simple to migrate it to a native AHV VM.
There are several utilies for replicating and migrating your workloads to prepare them for AHV.

Hi 

We also have a customer interested in doing P2V to AHV. Can you tell us more about the planned tool you mentioned and if it will cost extra?

Thanks, regards
Sam

Hi ,

Product name is http://www.surelinesystems.com/
check it and test it - it is paid per migrated server to AHV

What OS versions you are planning to move to AHV?

Great, thanks for the link. Will take a look!

Hi  

Let us know how things work out for you here in the forum - I'm sure it will help many other folks!

Thanks

Hi  

i've migrated 2 live physical servers running with Linux Ubuntu 14.04.2 and Linux CentOS 5.6 to acropolis. it was a success and with minimal downtime.

i'm using VMware Standalone converter tool as p2v tools. once completed i've uploaded the *-flat.vmdk file into Nutanix container and boot them up.

i used below link as reference.
http://vmwaremine.com/2015/09/14/migrate-suse-linux-from-vmware-esxi-to-nutanix-ahv-in-minutes/#sthash.lw4NjXnC.dpbs

many thanks to 

i will update further once i migrated the rest of the servers.

Hi ,

i'm having trouble to port over ubuntu 14.04.01. it seems it cannot find the hdd.

is there any other configuration that i need to take care.

FYI, previously i managed to migrate Ubuntu 14.04.03

any recommendation?

Hi 

Sure I will let you know. I asked for a customer (we are an NX partner) who is doing a PoC but as I understand this was just information gathering and they will probably not deploy the tool until they should decide to buy Nutanix and AHV.

Hi 

Thats was also going to be my preference if there isn't too many migrations. I find the process to import a VM from vSphere to AHV pretty straightforward and didn't run into any issues. However the vm mobility drivers didn't work for Windows Server 2003 (MSI was compiled using a too recent version of Windows installer). Nutanix support said they would support such a VM even if it isn't on the list but only if we manage to install their driver (not the Fedora Virtio driver). Which of course makes sense. We are currently waiting for an answer if there is a workaround/other MSI we can use.

Hi 

Based on my findings, there will be cases that we need to do some configuration on the operating system. Especialy on grub config. that what we did with Ubuntu 14.04.

As for p2v for Windows Server 2003 into Acropolis, most probably to have the vDisk on IDE. I've tried to update the SCSI driver with virtio by fedora and the vm become blue screen. maybe due to instability of the driver.

Newer version of operating system is pretty straight forward. Just be really carefull when you migrate any old operating system.

My next test is to migrate RH Linux 4.:p:p:p

it would be great if Nutanix can come out with a converter like vmware did.

Hi team,

I have a customer that runs Windows Servers operating system with 32bit due to applications' requirement. Is there any way that we can use SCSI virtio driver for the server? any workaround?

zizulrahman wrote:Hi team,

I have a customer that runs Windows Servers operating system with 32bit due to applications' requirement. Is there any way that we can use SCSI virtio driver for the server? any workaround?

Hi zizulrahman

I was in contact with Nutanix support recently for the same matter. You can give the open source VirtIO drivers a try (I haven't tested it myself) which might or might not work. This will however not be officially supported by Nutanix and you will probably get only best effort support. Currently Nutanix doesn't plan to release 32 Bit drivers (answer from Dec 28th 2015) due to limited demand but if you raise an RFE with them you can push that number a bit higher and who knows they might consider it in the future.

Hi ,

Thanks for info. We've tried the virtio from fedora and it work. However, you can have only as IDE. BTW, how to go about RFE?

Hi team,

Anybody have the experience of migrating Windows Server OS with microsoft clustering - P2V?

zizulrahman wrote:Hi @sam,

Thanks for info. We've tried the virtio from fedora and it work. However, you can have only as IDE. BTW, how to go about RFE?

Hi team,

Anybody have the experience of migrating Windows Server OS with microsoft clustering - P2V?

You can do that on the Nutanix suport portal (portal.nutanix.com) when opening a case you just choose "RFE" as type.

zizulrahman wrote:Hi @sam,

Thanks for info. We've tried the virtio from fedora and it work. However, you can have only as IDE. BTW, how to go about RFE?

Hi team,

Anybody have the experience of migrating Windows Server OS with microsoft clustering - P2V?

Would you be able to provdie the link to the virtio from fedora? And this worked with Windows 2003 32bit?

Hi 

Good to hear you had some success with the Fedora drivers. I know it's only IDE so this will probably give you potentially a bit of a IO performance impact (don't have any numbers though).

Regarding the RFE: You go to the Nutanix Support portal (portal.nutanix.com) and when you open a case you can select "RFE" in the drop down as opposed to "technical problem".

Is this Nutanix Native P2V converter avaliable now?

artur_ka wrote:Hi @zizulrahman

I replayed to your message on my facebook page but Iwill repeat here for broader audience.
You have two options, VMware converter --> export to file ---> and import to AHV or wait few weeks and Nutanix will announce native P2V tool for AHV - 3'rd party partnership.

Let me know shell you have more questions

Thanks
Artur