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July 16th, 2008 04:00
Running ECC 6.x on vmware hosts
Hi!
About to start planning of a fresh install of Control Center 6.x to replace an ageing ECC 5.2 install, and one of the options we're looking at is installing the new ECC on virtual servers/hosts. I have been looking for some info about this, but to be honest, i havent found much so far. I know it is supported, its more of a question of "how well does it work", and are there any issues/problems or things you need to remember because you're installing it on a vmware environment instead of physical servers ?
One thing in particular i've been trying to find is how ECC would communicate with the symmetrix etc. I guess you'd somehow have to share the HBA's of the ESX server to the virtual windowshost, so ECC could use them somehow to communicate through the gatekeepers, or is this automatically handled without you having to think of anything in particular ?
And if anyone could think of any good reasons why we should (or shouldnt) install our ECC servers as vmware guests, feel free to enlighten me
(One of the reasons for considering this is that it seems much easier to be able to just move the virtual servers to a secondary site and start them there, than to start on clustering the ECC environment, especially considering the total installation is small.
Thanks in advance for any help/experience on the subject.
About to start planning of a fresh install of Control Center 6.x to replace an ageing ECC 5.2 install, and one of the options we're looking at is installing the new ECC on virtual servers/hosts. I have been looking for some info about this, but to be honest, i havent found much so far. I know it is supported, its more of a question of "how well does it work", and are there any issues/problems or things you need to remember because you're installing it on a vmware environment instead of physical servers ?
One thing in particular i've been trying to find is how ECC would communicate with the symmetrix etc. I guess you'd somehow have to share the HBA's of the ESX server to the virtual windowshost, so ECC could use them somehow to communicate through the gatekeepers, or is this automatically handled without you having to think of anything in particular ?
And if anyone could think of any good reasons why we should (or shouldnt) install our ECC servers as vmware guests, feel free to enlighten me
(One of the reasons for considering this is that it seems much easier to be able to just move the virtual servers to a secondary site and start them there, than to start on clustering the ECC environment, especially considering the total installation is small.
Thanks in advance for any help/experience on the subject.
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Allen Ward
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2.1K Posts
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July 16th, 2008 13:00
We took a serious look at doing this for a recent upgrade, but our hand was forced and we couldn't do all the required research in time. We had a data center water leak that took out the old 5.2 environment and we had to build the new environment fast.
It was looking quite promising, but we still were not sure about performance over all. Have you seen the white paper EMC has published on installing in a virtual environment? It does provide a lot of additional detail.
The one clear answer I can give you is on how to deal with the gatekeeper devices. According to EMC you can pass the GKs through the ESX host to the VMs as RAW disks (RDM devices?) and they will work just fine. Again, we haven't tested this, but the EMC engineer I talked to was adamant that it would work.
BarryR1
16 Posts
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July 17th, 2008 10:00
Here is an white paper that details how to carry out this procedure:
Installing ControlCenter 6.0 in a
VMware Environment
Technical Notes
P/N 300-005-436
REV A04
March 2008
And here is the note that Allen correctly refers to (from the above paper):
Note: If you migrate a physical host containing a Symmetrix and/or SDM agent, the
destination ESX Server must be able to see the same Symmetrix Array that the physical host can
see. All devices visible to the physical host being migrated, including all Gatekeeper devices,
will need to be re-created on the destination ESX Server and made visible to the new Guest via
Raw Data Mapping (RDM).
Sio1
1 Message
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September 1st, 2008 17:00
An issue I'm wrestling with at present is the LUN requirements for the ECC guests. The EMC Tehnical Note on Installing ControlCenter in a VMware Environment recommends allocating dedicated LUNs for the ECC guests. It's not clear whether the recommendation is to have the entire virtual machine (OS, Application Data, VMswap, VM config files) on a single dedicated LUN or whether the OS vmdk file, VMswap and config files can be stored on general shared storage. It would be nice to have some clarification around this in the Technical Note and the rationale behind this.
I'm keen to hear how others have approached this.
Thanks!