Migration steps to move the Red-Hat Satellite server to a virtual farm
Hi,
We are currently trying to explore and take a deep dive into virtualization and have identified the Red-Hat Satellite Server as a potential candidate to virtualize.
We have a satellite server running on an HP blade machine with embedded Oracle DB and would like to migrate that to a VMWare virtual machine.
Are there any documents or best practices to achieve this?
Rgds,
Siddharth.
Responses
Hello Siddharth,
You need to install the latest rhn-upgrade package on the RHN Satellite which will contain :
- /etc/sysconfig/rhn/satellite-upgrade/README
- /etc/sysconfig/rhn/satellite-upgrade/doc/satellite-and-os-upgrade.txt
As you are looking only for the hardware change (i.e moving from physical to virtual) and not upgrade, you can skip the steps which refer to upgrade of the schema.
Let us know if this helps.
Paresh
Hello Siddharth,
Not sure if that would work as I haven't seen it tried and tested. Thus I would not recommend P2V. Instead recommendation is to follow the README and satellite-and-os-upgrade.txt (excluding the upgrade part). In short it would be :
- Take a backup of database and important files and directories referring the kbase article What files and directories are important during migration/backup of my Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite Server?
- Deactivation of existing connected Satellite
- Installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or 6 on x86_64 (prefered) or s390x architectures in your virtual farm
- Installation of RHN Satellite on the destination virtual machine
- Restoration of old databases
- Essential post-upgrade tasks
- Re-activation of RHN Satellite service against RHN Classic
Paresh
I was out when our Satellite box lost 2 drives from its RAID array.
My boss and backup used VMware's P2V solution and had it up and running virtually before I came back the next day.
We were running the embedded database, v5.4.1 of the server, on RH 5.x. Now on VMware's ESX server.
So, anecdotally, it can work. This is too late to help you, I'm sure, but I thought you'd like to hear about it. Good luck!
-Brad
Guru
6222 points
Hello Paresh,
Well it works, for I have a RHN Satellite running on KVM, so VMWare should be much of problem to do P2V with either VMWare converter or g4l (Ghost for Linux).
The amount of need resource on the virtual machine if the RHN database is big, might not make the RHN Satellite a best candidate for virtualization.
My Satellite takes about half an hour to load the updates for RHEL 6 in a normal situation. RHEL 6.4 took a day.
If this unacceptable for Siddharth's situation, then the physical server is probably a beter solution.
Kind regards,
ir. Jan Gerrit Kootstra
Red Hat
Active Contributor
156 points
I can only add my voice to the suggestion that virtualization may not be the best solution for Satelllite. My first experience with Satellite was using KVM and it took overnight and part of the next morning to load RHEL 6 updates. If you're looking for performance you probably need to use a physical server.
Regards,
David
Nonsense. Virtualization isn't the problem. The rediculously small database configuration (SGA size) is a significant factor with slow performance. Granted Tomcat and Python et. al. aren't exactly fast in their own right but RedHat also crippled the memory sizes of the Java heap/stack too! As to how efficiently the code processes large datasets is very much in question, but change some parameters like JAVA_OPTS and tune the database (helps to scatter the I/O over different spindle sets) can also help a lot. But for this last you'll need a decent Oracle DBA to help you as it's far out of scope to address in this setting.
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