Project #01 (P.03)

In my current project, customer got Windows server 2003 x86 with database on MS SQL server 2000 which is using by one application and one web server.
The web server it self running on windows server 2003 as well and the main portal is written by ASP .net

I talked with customer and the application/portal developer if it’s possible to migrate to MS SQL 2008 so they could get better performance and availability but developers are not seems to like this idea.
For what ever reason they told me that they will check this possibility next month but I don’t have enough time for this as I have to finish this project next week, so I talked with IT administrator and get one copy of database for testing purpose.
I checked installed the SQL server 2008 on test VM and imported the DB and it’s worked.
But as the availability of the service is very important to the customer, I decided to configure a cluster server with two node for SQL server and running the web portal with NLB feature.

I created two VMs as usual, installed both OS, VMware Tools and …, Join the domain and …!
I configured my storage so my servers would have 4 partitions, one as Quorum, one for MSDTC, one for MS SQL installation and one for databases respectively.
Then I went to add the LUNs as physical RDM (as long as I’m using Windows 2008, I can’t use Virtual RDM) and I saw something painful, ….both VMs configured to have “Thin Disk” for their storage and as I read before these hard disks should be installed with “FT Support” enabled so their type would be “eagerzeroedthick”.
So, I have two these options:
1. Doing these process again with VMs created with “eagerzeroedthick” disks.
2. Converting the VMs themselves to VMs with “eagerzeroedthick” disks, removing first VMs (thin disk).
3. Converting disks form thin to eagerzeroedthick

As it’s matter of time as well as boring process of Windows installation and because it would be good chance to check the different ways of doing one thing (which is needed for exams for sure), I chose to convert the disks.
I start converting the first VM hard disk by using the ESXi itself with following commands.
vmkfstools -i /vmfs/volumes/lun-prv/sql1/sql1.vmdk /vmfs/volumes/lun-prv/sql1/sql1_new.vmdk -d eagerzeroedthick

And used “VMware vSphere CLI (vCLI)” for second VM.
vmkfstools.pl --server 10.1.9.11 --username root -i /vmfs/volumes/lun-prv/sql2/sql2.vmdk /vmfs/volumes/lun-prv/sql2/sql2_new.vmdk -d eagerzeroedthick

It takes about 3 hours to convert 50GB thin disk to “eagerzeroedthick” disk and it waste a lot of times, so, I would be more careful next time when deploying my VMs from template! 😉