VMWare, Server Migration, and R1Soft

Those that know me know I do a lot of server work for Pleth, LLC and that most Fridays I can be found there. We've been in the process of moving from a Parallels Virtuozzo environment to a VMWare environment. So far, the process has went well. We have a private rack in our datacenter at ThePlanet and just installed a nice new system with quad cores, tons of ram and storage. It's running VMWare Server 2 on Red Hat Linux 5 with Centos 5.3 VM's. One of the VPS's on this hardware node has a 100 domain Plesk 9.2 installed on it, and we've been moving some of the domains from the old Virtuozzo/Plesk containers onto this machine. VMWare has made it very easy to be portable from one hardware platform to another because of the OS independent nature of its Virtualization environment. So far, this has been a very smooth process, especially since we have control of our own C-Block of IP's.

Today, however, wasn't the normal day. We had a few problems transferring large amounts of data from one of the Virtuozzo VPS's onto the VMWare one. We've been using Plesk's migration utility (which Greg finds very handy - I prefer SCP and mysqldump myself...lol) but for some reason it kept failing with large files. Needless to day, we had to fight it to make it work and my trusty ol' tar/scp in the end, saved the day.

The other "fun" thing that happened was we had a VPS that I just set up get, well, corrupted (my fault!!). Since there wasn't anything on it, my geek curiosity got the best of me and I actually restored it from a backup. Bare-Metal Restored it. How cool is that? We use R1Soft's CDP Server to make several snapshots of our systems throughout the day. It has Bare-Metal Restore capabilities, so I downloaded the CD ISO from their website, booted the VMWare VPS with it, and used it to connect back to the backup server and about 10 min later it was running again. Greg and I chuckled like 3 yr olds for a minute. Geek humor....