Advice on running XP x64 through VMWare Server

May 28, 2008 12:47 PM

XP Pro x64 Server + VMware Server + XP Pro x64 --- So my boss has this idea of running VMware Server on our server and backing up the VMware image nightly. His thought here, is that if the server craps out, all we have to do is re-install, copy over the VMware image and we are back in business.

So... What he has me doing right now, is wiping two brand new servers, installing XP x64 on both, and VMware on one. I will then be installing a third copy of XP x64 on VMware Server. The object is to benchmark the server running XP x64 and to benchmark the server running XP x64 through VMware server and find out what kind of performance hit (disk, cpu, memory) we will take by running XP x64 through VMware. I also have a copy of XP x32 around here that we will be trying out.

This is a very small company, and I am put in charge of this because I have the most knowledge of computers, although I would never classify myself as an admin. I need to know if this idea has an potential, if there is something else we should be looking into all together, or if there is advice on how to proceed with this idea.

posted by B(oYo)BIES to computers & internet (12 comments total)

There are other virtualization products out there, Xen is amoung the most popular of these alternatives.

Depending on what you are ultimately trying to do you may probably should start out the conversation with SLA's you are trying to meet and go from there. If you're trying to go with a 2 to 4 hours downtime depending on your dataset you may be better served by a smallish tape robot and a solid backup/restore plan. If you're looking to eventually migrate to an ESX infrastructure (for redundancy or increased capacity) or expect to need to expand the application footprint or need to meet a <2>
So start with your expected restore time and what it costs the business and go from there. After you have that figured out think about things like redundancy in the chassis and the class of hardware you are going with for the server. It usually boils down to the hourly cost to the business to have a service or application out of commission.

Any questions in general repost to the thread or mefi mail me.
posted by iamabot at 1:05 PM on May 28, 2008

Ok first paragraph got munged by metacode...reposted


Depending on what you are ultimately trying to do you may probably should start out the conversation with SLA's you are trying to meet and go from there. If you're trying to go with a 2 to 4 hours downtime depending on your dataset you may be better served by a smallish tape robot and a solid backup/restore plan. If you're looking to eventually migrate to an ESX infrastructure (for redundancy or increased capacity) or expect to need to expand the application footprint or need to meet a 2 to 4 hours restore window you may want to look at alternatives like 2 x smaller servers and a hardware loadbalancer set.
posted by iamabot at 1:07 PM on May 28, 2008

Virtual servers are nice, because the OS isn't tied into the physical hardware. Restoring an OS from a dead server onto another machine with different hardware can be problematic. Restoring a virtual machine can be as simple as copying a file. You'll have to decide if this convenience is greater than the performance hit of virtualization.
posted by Area Control at 1:10 PM on May 28, 2008

Why XP x64? If you want to run your desktop PCs on the server, you're better off running Windows Terminal Services or Citrix. Also, I could be wrong, but I don't believe that VMWare Server is capable of live backup. I believe you'll have to stop the Virtual Machine to ensure you've got a good backup. I'm no VMWare expert, but it may be that VMWare ESX is really what you're looking for (live backup, will move a live VM between servers, etc.)

iamabot is right. Figure out what you're trying to do and then come up with a solution, rather than the other way around.
posted by cnc at 1:13 PM on May 28, 2008

"live backup, will move a live VM between servers, etc."

VMWare ESX won't do these things unless paired with the VirtualCenter management tool, which runs another $1500 or so even before you license a Windows OS and DBMS to run it on. Oh and then you need to dedicate a box to act as the VCB proxy, and that box must be Windows 2003 SP1 or better. Someone who is taking XP seriously as a VMWare host isn't going to be dropping three or four grand on VMWare doodads and Windows licenses to make it go.

"So my boss has this idea of running VMware Server on our server and backing up the VMware image nightly. His thought here, is that if the server craps out, all we have to do is re-install, copy over the VMware image and we are back in business."

Yep, that's pretty much how it works. The big win here is using virtualization to abstract away the hardware -- you can pick up this VM and run it anywhere you need to restore it.

You'll have to schedule the VM to shut down prior to the backup job, and then you'll need some means to start it back up (I don't know how that works on Windows hosts since I don't use them, but I do know Linux VMWare Server hosts have some easily scriptable command line tools to start and stop VMs).
posted by majick at 2:40 PM on May 28, 2008

I love VMware. I've been using both desktop and server virtualization products for years. But this strikes me as a bad use for it. There are backup and restore products that would be a better bet for this sort of thing.

For server virtualization in a production environment, you really need VMware ESX. The free VMware Server isn't designed for production use, really. And it will have significant overhead.

And why exactly are you putting XP on servers? What exactly is this "server" doing?
posted by me & my monkey at 3:41 PM on May 28, 2008

Why not skip the VM and just image the server daily? (Ghost, TrueImage)

You get to skip the step of reinstalling windows if the server craps out.
posted by wongcorgi at 3:53 PM on May 28, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

There are lots of concerns here, you'll know the application and environment better, just start out with your recovery and uptime goals/intervals and work your way from there. When you understand those you can cross lots of the options off the list pretty handily.
posted by iamabot at 3:58 PM on May 28, 2008

Your boss is mistaken. Youre not just copying the image while its live. i dont care if it supports VSS or what the vendors are trying to sell you. If you tried you'd get a corrupted image. Why not just shut down the server take an image of the existing server and be done with it? I do it all the time with ghost. Regardless, the machine must be off to take a reliable image, and even then its not a great use of a resources. Instead of backing up your files, settings, and database dumps you're putting everything into an image format that was never designed for fault tolerance. A bad bit or two and suddenly your cheapo vmware tools cant read the image. Oops!

What you should be doing is getting good backups of your data and doing regular test restores.
posted by damn dirty ape at 5:36 PM on May 28, 2008

If you really want this kind of uptime you probably should be moving to a hosted data center that can take care of this without the expenses involved with VMW. Don't get me wrong, it is a great product, and I'm sure the datacenter you go with will use it, but this is too expensive for you. As others have said, you'll want:

- ESX Host
- Windows 2003 running lic server and VI
- VMW consolidated backup running on a separate machine and with Symantec or some other backup program.
- Ideally VMotion so you can move between ESX hosts if one were to go down.

Without VMotion you're looking at around $10k as an entry point for licensing fees and stand-alone servers. This scales up really well and can save you a lot of money.

That said, I would backup snapshots and keep data separate and persistent to the disk. Then backup the disk as normal. You shouldn't be doing a lot of snapshots and the data should be in its own sandbox anyway. So say your setup for an application is segmented like this (OS + Program) + (Data) ... well you take the data and put it on a separate disk and back it up all the time with a Symantec backup agent. You'll thank me for the ability to do granular restores. THEN you would back the server (OS+Program) in snapshots. You only need snapshots when you make changes, so it shouldn't be much of a problem to do these by hand.

That's how I would do it, that's how I actually do it. But I do it for convenience. If you really, really need the ability to transfer machines during downtime, spring for hosted services or the full ESX+VMotion.
posted by geoff. at 5:43 PM on May 28, 2008

What software will be installed/What will the server be doing? Perhaps you should also look into other disaster recovery mechanisms. Eg If the system is a file server perhaps you could use a windows server OS and use DFS to replicate data.
If you are set on the Virtualisation idea, consider using Windows 2008 with the Hyper-V role installed. It is still a Release Candidate, but from what I've seen it's very stable - and very (very!) cheap. Plus it has many features that are comparable to VMware ESX server.
posted by Haydn at 6:15 PM on May 29, 2008

nthing that using vmware and backing up the image is a bad idea. Since you have to shut down the VM to image it, I don't see an advantage over shutting down the entire server and imaging it. Regardless, imaging the entire server isn't a good backup strategy. Figure out how to backup and restore your data.
posted by PueExMachina at 7:53 PM on May 29, 2008