Virtualising EV 8.0.5

[Johnmac368]

Hi

We intend virtualising our 3 Enterprise Vault servers running Enterprise Vault for Exchange V8.0.5 onto VMware ESXi 4.1, Enterprise Plus and I understand that the actual conversion process is not officially supported by Symatec, although EV 8 is supported in an ESXi 4.1 virtual environment.

Are there any particular issues or "gotchas" we should be aware of when virtualising EV 8?

Any help greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[Jeff_Shotton · Accepted solution]

You should take a read of the following whitepaper :

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH180094

VMWare obviously means a bit of a performance hit, but as long as the virtual boxes are sized correctly then this shouldn't be an issue.

There is nothing to stop you from building up the new virtual machines in parallel and doing a move via alternate name DR (or even keep the name the same) just as you would when going from 32 to 64 bit OS.

In fact, if you have NOT yet moved over to Windows 2008 R2 x64 I would recommend that you think of doing all of this in one go (i.e build the new VM as x64 and do the migration over) since this will save you from having to do the whole process all over again.

Here is the doc to migrate over to x64 hardware, which is applicable to EV8 as well as EV9

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH141481

If on EV9 sp1+ and doing the move you can also use the migration wizard...so maybe an in-place upgrade and using the migration wizard would be easier.

http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO42445

Regards,

Jeff

[Johnmac368]

Thanks for info., Jeff but articles refer to EV & 10 and we are on EV V8.0.5

Regards

John

[Johnmac368]

Thanks for info., Jeff but articles refer to EV & 10 and we are on EV V8.0.5

Regards

John

[TonySterling]

You really need to upgrade.  Support for EV 8 will be winding down soon so this is a perfect opportunity for you to get to the latest version of EV and be on new virtual machines.

[Jeff_Shotton]

Yup the clock is ticking. EV8 partial support begins 1st March 2013 (no more hotfixes from that date)

The whitepaper may be written with EV10 in mind, but the best practice for deploying in a virtual environment still stands - use a 'server partitioning' rather than a 'server sharing' methodology.

What I mean by this is, do not over deploy to a single VM Host - you should have a couple of CPU's free after adding up all the virtual machines running on the box, along with a few GB of RAM. Make sure that memory balooning and anything which allows the virtual machines to share resource is switched off.

The process here : http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH141481  is perfectly applicable to EV8

Regards,

Jeff