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Note: To see a list of all the sessions planned for ATT Live 2012, go to http://bit.ly/Asgjo4.

This Session Spotlight on PlateSpin Migrate 9 comes from Frank Moore (see below for a brief bio on Frank).

My objective for this session is to show you how to use PlateSpin Migrate 9 to save you time and money on almost every project in your Data Center by quickly and easily building test labs or development systems that exactly match the production systems. But--here's the best part--you can use this tool without taking your live systems out of production, then later sync back the changes you made on the lab or development systems.

How would you like to have a tool to migrate live Windows and Linux workloads from and to physical or virtual machines on many different hypervisors? How about moving a VMware workload to a free Linux virtual machine in order to do development? Try that with your VMware tools!

Or how about moving that overloaded VM back to a physical machine so it can provide better service? Try that with your VMware tools!

In this session, I will also show you how you can create gold master workload images that can then be deployed to physical machine using any hardware you have around or to virtual machines on any hypervisor you have available.

Here are some specific workload migration tips I'm going to cover in this session:

1. The Importance of Testing

   The best way to mitigate the risk is to decouple the different activities to remove them from the critical path.

   For example, allowing user acceptance testing to be done outside of the maintenance window.

   • PlateSpin Migrate gives you the ability to transfer a workload into a virtual machine, test the workload and then cut over to the new workload
   • This means the initial transfer can be done during the maintenance window and testing can occur out-of-band
   • Once the testing is done a Server Sync can be done to update the data
   • A cut-over could then be done and the relocated workload could take over
2. General Migration Considerations

   In general there are three interrelated areas of consideration when planning a Workload Relocation:

   • Tolerable Service Downtime
   • Size of workload to relocate
   • Network throughput

   If there is no way to relocate the workload without downtime then it becomes a question of how long will the relocation take during which the source workload is unavailable.
   For example, a 15 GB workload that needs to be relocated over a WAN with poor throughput of 10 Mbps will cause the source server to be down for 3.4 hours (15 GB /10 Mbps) when not using a Live Migration.

3. Block-Level Transfer (Live)

   Windows

   • Use for high-transaction Windows workloads using NTFS
   • Leverages VSS on Windows 2003 SP1 or later
   • Applications must support VSS

   Linux

   • If LVM is available on the source it leverages LVM snapshots
   • If LVM is unavailable on the source, it uses the Migrate block-level data transfer mechanism
   • To use with customized kernels, you must rebuild the blkwatch module included with Migrate

Register today or find out more about ATT Live 2012, including a look at our proposed course catalog at: www.novell.com/attlive!

ATT Live 2012
May 15-18, 2012
Henderson (Las Vegas), NV
4 days of instructor-led, hands-on advanced technical training for only $1,400 if you register before March 31!

Frank Moore: Brief Bio

• Masters of Applied Science in Computer Systems
• 15 years as a network and systems consultant for Windows, Unix and Linux systems for data center operations
• 2 years experience with Novell Operations Center implementing service modeling for Business Service Management and Service Level Management
• 2 years of network and system security background using OSSEC tools
• 9 years at Novell as an Advanced Technical Trainer in the areas of Linux, Identity Manager, Zenworks for Servers

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.