Phsycal to Virtual

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Good day to you all.

We are moving our physical RHEL servers to VM. Once this move is complete, we have to test the servers to make sure they are in order.

What are some of the things you will recommend for us to check and test ?

Thank you always for your help.

A Ash

aa
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james.radtke@siriusxm.com's picture Guru 6863 points
24 July 2014 1:19 PM

Hi Arrey - great question.
What method are you using to P2V your hosts?

aa Pro 639 points
24 July 2014 1:27 PM

My VMware team is using VMware-converter. I install the client on the rhel servers and they do the conversion . Some physical servers will just be powered off and moved to a new location. I just want to get a heads up as to what to check for when the time comes.

Thanks James

R. Hinton's picture Guru 6827 points
25 July 2014 5:33 PM

Arrey,

One side note,

For your systems you go P to V, make sure to adjust your /etc/ntp.conf (peer and server directives) and /etc/ntp/step-tickers to a physical ntp sources afterwards in case any of your ntp servers are currently physical. There's warnings from VMware regarding setting ntp to virtual systems. Also see this Red Hat Best Practice regarding ntp.

james.radtke@siriusxm.com's picture Guru 6863 points
27 July 2014 9:52 PM

Some other things to check
* what kernel params are in /boot/grub/grub.conf which may (or may not) help for a VM
* I/O tuning that might have been specific to HBA-attached SAN or local storage
* network tuning
* if you happened to have done NUMA-specific tuning, I imagine that all gets thrown out the window
* if you use tuned profiles, they should be reviewed and adjusted. I believe there is an included Virtual Machine profile.

If your shop runs a fairly "vanilla" install of RHEL (without a lot of tuning) I think you will probably get expected results and things should run fine (of course, what Remmele mentioned is important).

I think if you were to follow a tuning or best-practice doc for running RHEL on VMware, you will be fine.

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