Making the Move to a VM Platform

[Glenn_Martin]

Without doubt, many of our customers are moving their EV environment to a Virtualised platform. This partly due to the obvious cost & operational benefits but also because customers are planning their upgrade cycles through from V8 to V9 and onto V10. In fact if you check our pre-reqs for running V10 in our compatibility guide, you’ll see that we support only Windows 2008 R2 or later. So yes, moving from an old x32 hardware platform to a new x64 virtualised environment is proving to be a popular route for many. However, a frequent question we’ve heard is “do you have any best practice guidance for deploying EV on VM Ware” which has been something we’ve been working to address.

Therefore we’re pleased to announce the availability of an excellent new, long-awaited, and much anticipated Best Practice Paper on configuring EV in VMware environments.  This has been written by Dan Strydom, from our Technical Field Enablement. It’s probably more accurate to say it’s about the best practice of designing/configuring VMware to be optimal for EV, rather than the other way around.  The document has been written after input from our customers, partners, support & engineering not to mention Dan’s extensive research; the document is specific to EV10 & VMWare vSphere 4.1/5.0.

Other related reading you might want to revist is a previous post which highlighted information available to help you understand how to migrate EV between hardware platforms  & you should also read more about our server settings migration wizzard.

The new document is called Best Practice Guide Implementing Enterprise Vault on VMware and contains the following topics.

• Choosing the Right Platform for Enterprise Vault
• Sizing Enterprise Vault 10 for VMware
• Differences in Versions and Editions of VMware
• ESX Host Configuration
• Optimizing VMware for Enterprise Vault
• CPU configuration
• Memory Configuration
• Disk Configuration
• Number of virtual machines per LUN
• Enterprise Vault per Server Storage Locations
• Choosing Suitable Storage for Index Locations
• General ESXi Storage Recommendations
• Network Configuration
• Performance Impact of Upgrading to Enterprise Vault 10 from Earlier Versions
• Virtualizing SQL Server
• Other Deployment Recommendations
• General VMware Recommendations

This document is now available on Symwise via the following link.

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

Happy Migrating

Glenn