I can’t find anything specifically about VMs on the BigFix Knowledge Base about this so thought I’d post here to get input from those that may have done this type of server migration before or anyone with any recommendations/warnings.
We run in the exact environment you are moving to. I’ve used that same environment at two different companies. We have a smaller BigFix deployment.
The only issue we ever had was unallocating CPU and Memory - we started off with a single proc and 2 GB on the BES server. The SQL server always had 2 procs and 4 GB. We adjusted up as needed after watching the environment for a few months. We had no other issues and the benefit of going virtual is that you can adjust and migrate to faster hardware as needed.
John
Edit:
boyd, good point on the disks. We’ve always used 15k Fiber disks (EMC CX3 / CX4) and haven’t had any IO issues, for what it’s worth.
We’re running a virtualized BES Server and SQL Server as well. At the moment, they’re both running in the same VM. It’s a
very
beefy VM though
I’d say that disk IO is another thing you want to keep an eye on. It can definitely be a major bottleneck, depending on what kinds of disks you’re using. Since the BES server seems to make many small reads and writes, an SSD may be the ideal type of storage to use. This is just a theory though. We’re still using 15k SAS
we are currently running VM with remote SQL (5000 clients), but will be moving to physical with the release of verion 8. Keep in mind that BigFix does not recommend using virtual to host the main bigfix server, but it obviously works depending on your number of clients.
I’ve just had a word with our server team and now they tell me they first want to move
only
the SQL database to a non-VM SQL database!
The DB will be running on a beefy server with 15k rpm fiber disk SAN, quad cpu cores, 32GB RAM. This server will be hosting other SQL instances too. We will only have about 4000 clients all told so I think this should be fine.
Actually, moving just the DB first then virtualising the BES server later will give us a nice idea of how the DB performance is different on it’s own. I expect the BES server performance isn’t as important in the scope of things as the SQL server and the newly VM’d BES server will be a higher spec anyway.
