P2V’ing a SCOM 2007 R2 Root Management Server (RMS)

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This was fun! The environment I am presently working in is undergoing a massive P2V effort. If it can be virtualized, its being virtualized. I swear they’d virtualize the refrigerator in the break room if that was possible. The RMS was hosted on a P-Class Blade and today it was scheduled to be virtualized. I am an advocate of virtualization of all SCOM 2007 R2 roles. If configured correctly, performance is not impacted and in the case of clustered Hyper-V environments, you gain RMS high availability without the traditional RMS / physical cluster headaches.

The environment is comprised of 2 hyper-v failover clusters, each with 2 nodes. Windows Server 2008 R2. The environment is managed with SCVMM 2008 R2 and monitored with SCOM 2007 R2. This blog is just a summary of what was done and to confirm it is very easy to do and performance is not impacted.

Preparation:

  1. Backed up OperationsManager database.

  2. Backed up all custom management packs.

  3. Put the RMS Key in a handy place….just in case.

  4. Verify all Windows Updates applied to source and target.

Execution:

  1. In SCVMM 2008 R2, ran “Convert Physical Server”
  2. Just followed the wizard. SCVMM confirmed I was placing on a hyper-v failover host and did I want the virtual machine to be a failover host.
  3. I chose fixed disk over dynamic.
  4. 35 minutes later and the RMS was virtualized.
  5. The original server was powered down and as I write this is being cannibalized for parts.

The newly virtualized RMS has 4 GB of RAM and 4 3.00 GHz Xeon MP and was placed on a CSV. I was concerned about performance because the CSV has many guests on it so I created a dedicated vDisk in the SAN. 40GB RAID 1. After presenting it to the cluster, went back to SCVMM 2008 R2 and migrated the storage. This did interrupt service since the guest could not be on-line but for a mere 10 minutes. I just finished applying the newly released cumulative service pack and the management group is 100% operational. The last physical component is the SQL Server…….guess what i am doing after lunch? :-)