Migration to VMWare w/ P2V... Any experiences or suggestions?

nvahalik · Post by **nvahalik** » Wed May 20, 2009 2:02 pm

Hey guys,
We are wanting to migrate our existing ZCS installation to a VMWare box. Anyone have any experience with this or caveats? Is P2V the way to go or are there better solutions out there? Just curious...
Thanks

bdial · Post by **bdial** » Wed May 20, 2009 2:50 pm

well depends on hte physical box. your physical box may be 64bit and dual cpu, and really depending on your config you may want to be 32bit and single vcpu in vmware world. for me i'd create a new virtual machine and migrate hte zimbra install.

nvahalik · Post by **nvahalik** » Wed May 20, 2009 3:01 pm

I am curious to know why one might switch from 64-bit to 32-bit... is there a difference for Zimbra in the VMWare world?
We have 150 mailboxes, ~230GB of data. ~15k msgs per day.

bdial · Post by **bdial** » Wed May 20, 2009 3:05 pm

if you don't need 64bit i.e. you have less than 4gb of ram on the virtual machine i think vmware runs 32bit machines better. after all esx is a 32bit hypervisor.

dustys · Post by **dustys** » Wed May 20, 2009 3:36 pm

We just completed the majority of such a migration. What we did is created the additional mailbox servers in VMware and then zmmailboxmove'ed the mailboxes. It was actually quite painless. We also put up a Proxy in front of the mailbox servers, so that as a mailbox was moved from one server to another, the user's server address stayed the same. The only issues we noticed were:
1.) If you have a BES, it will not work through the proxy at this point.

2.) If your users use IM, then they will loose their IM list after the move and will need to re-add all buddies.

3.) IM Clients will need to be re-configured to point directly to the mailbox server they are on. (Hoping that this will be fixed in the future and use the proxy)

4.) Ran into some caching issues when moving mailboxes: Zmmailboxmove Results in Corrupted Mailboxes
The last part we have left is redirecting LDAP and Logger and promoting one of our mailbox servers to master LDAP server. This should be a task of following Promoting Replica to LDAP Master and deleting the old server from LDAP once every account is moved.
Cheers,

Dusty

dustys · Post by **dustys** » Wed May 20, 2009 3:38 pm

[quote user="nvahalik"]I am curious to know why one might switch from 64-bit to 32-bit... is there a difference for Zimbra in the VMWare world?
We have 150 mailboxes, ~230GB of data. ~15k msgs per day.[/QUOTE]
I wouldn't run this with less than 8GB of RAM, thus we kept everything in 64-bit and gave it 4 vCPUs.
DJS