- #CLOUDBERRY BACKUP BARE METAL DRIVERS#
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I typically only need a few at a time, and what's important is that I have Exchange 2000, SQL Server X, or XYZ x.x running they don't need to run that fast. With 4 GB of RAM and a 3.5 GHz dual-core processor, I can run about eight virtual servers at a time without swapping. I then used either qtparted (for Linux systems), or fdisk and ntfsresize (for Windows systems) to grow the original hard drive to the new size.
#CLOUDBERRY BACKUP BARE METAL DRIVERS#
I installed VMware tools into each virtual machine, which made their video and other drivers much happier.In almost every case, the virtual server came up without incident, and voila! I had moved a physical server into a virtual server without a hitch! One Windows server was blue-screening during the boot, but I pressed F8 and selected Last Known Good Configuration, and it booted just fine.
#CLOUDBERRY BACKUP BARE METAL ISO#
I "removed" the Knoppix CD by changing the symbolic link to point to an ISO image of a nonbootable CD and rebooted the virtual server.(We did this by mounting the NFS drive where we stored the image.) I used dd to copy the image of the real hard drive to the virtual hard drive in the virtual machine booted from the virtual CD.I booted the virtual machine into Knoppix using the virtual Knoppix CD.I used VMware to create a virtual CD drive that pointed to an ISO file that was actually a symbolic link to an ISO image of a Knoppix CD on the hard drive.I used VMware to create a virtual machine specifying a virtual IDE hard drive that was much bigger than the original, usually about 20 GB or 40 GB.(These images were typically 4 GB to 10 GB.
#CLOUDBERRY BACKUP BARE METAL FULL#
I used the alt-boot full image method to create an image of the entire /dev/hda hard drive to an NFS mount on the new VMware server.Here are the steps I followed for each server: I then followed the alt-boot recovery method to move all of those physical servers into virtual servers, virtually upgrading each of their CPUs, storage, and memory in the process. I installed into that server two Fibre Channel cards and two SCSI cards.
We bought a white box with a 3.5GHz Dual Core AMD processor, 4GB DDR2 RAM and 1.75TB of internal SATA disks. So we recently decided to see if we could get rid of all these servers with VMware. I could have used 100 machines, but that would obviously be prohibitive in many ways. We were constantly swapping SCSI and Fibre Channel cards, as well as installing and uninstalling applications. I never had enough machines, and I never had the right machines connected to the right hardware. Until just recently, we also had about 25 Intel machines running various versions of Linux and Windows and their associated applications (Exchange, SQL Server, Oracle, etc.). In addition to the usual backup hardware (SAN, tape libraries, virtual tape libraries), it consists of some Sun, IBM, and HP hardware running Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX. I get asked all kinds of questions about backup products and how they behave on different operating systems and applications, and I use a lab to answer these questions.