Four machines down and one to go!

subtitled.....Using System Center Virtual Machine Manager to help reduce my physical machine count....

Back in May I posted about some changes I was making to my home network. I did move a few things around but then I pushed the project aside. Two machines, godzilla and phoney, are no more. Godzilla was giving me too many hardware issues to be worth keeping around any longer, and phoney.....well....phoney is 14 yrs old. I couldn't get rid of it, so it just got pushed into a closet. I will no doubt boot the machine up annually just to see how many more years it will hold out.

Other changes......

I recently installed Windows and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to one of my quad-core boxes and started doing P2V conversions so I could just power down some additional old machines. I decided it was time to start being a little more green and also donate some machines to people who could do something with them besides run a bunch of pointless servers out of their house.

If you go back and read the post I linked to above, I have virtualized my webserver (wallace) as well as my Exchange Edge server (crashnburn). I used the Physical to Virtual conversion tools in SCVMM2008 to do flawless conversions of both machines. I was amazed at how easy it was. It is pretty time consuming though. It took about 2 hours to convert wallace and about 90 minutes to convert crashnburn. Measure that against building out a VM from scratch and migrating the data and I will take the P2V conversion any day.

As I write this, I am running the P2V conversion against sleestak. This machine was converted about 2 months ago to be an additional DC for my existing internal domain and to load balance DNS queries from the Internet. It is also my WSUS server. It has been converting for about 45 mins or so and I suspect it has another 30-45 before it is completely finished. When this one completes, I will have three physical computers I can power down. I will keep them around for a couple of weeks just in case anything squirrelly happens with their virtualized counterparts, but I feel confident I won't have to bring them back up in their old roles. That means two of the machines get donated while the other becomes a spare box for testing and as a spare in case anything bad happens to any of the remaining boxes.

The new(current) plan is to build out one more SCVMM platform and move bobobobobobobo into a VM and move one of the VM's from humvee (the name of the new Hyper-V/SCVMM server) over to share the load. That will leave me with wallofvoodoo (ISA Firewall), humvee, and unknown (whatever I name the new Hyper-V server) as physical boxes in my basement. I think that last time I only had 3 production machines running in my home lab was 10 years ago. I suspect my basement will be a little cooler this next summer.....

Whoa! Just checked on the crashnburn conversion and it seems to have finished up. So I am signing off to power down another machine and test mail flow!

Cheers!