Platespin Migrate v9 Upgrade Considerations
Novell recently released Platespin Migrate 9, which should address some Linux P2V issues we’ve been running into. Namely, that you can only migrate a Linux server in offline or “TakeControl” mode. We’ve been running into issues where network speed settings have prevented us from moving data from source to target – for example, if you’ve got a Linux physical server with a 1Gb/s adapter connecting to a 100Mb/s switch you’ll end up with horrendously slow data transfer speeds. With Windows you can specify that setting (100 vs. 1000) but with pre-v9 Migrate Linux migrations you can’t. We’re hoping that Migrate 9 will beef up this support, but as it turns out there is a somewhat significant architecture change with Platespin products this time around.
If you’re like us, you purchased “workload” licenses from Platespin/Novell and deployed your Portability Suite server. This server housed your Migrate and Protect jobs. But with v9 you can no longer house Protect and Migrate on the same server:
NOTE: As of the current release, PlateSpin Migrate and PlateSpin Protect are separate products, no longer packaged as editions of PlateSpin Portability Suite, and cannot be collocated on the same host.
Well, that sucks. Now I need two servers to do the same thing that I’ve been doing with one. And licensing? Well, let’s just say that after some mild brain damage I’m engaging Novell to help me through how we’re going to split these things up. As for the upgrade you can supposedly just upgrade in place – run the installer and Platespin will utilize your existing database instance. But if you activated all your licenses first for both Protect and Migrate, you’ve now got them all tied up for one product or the other (assuming you’re using local SQL. I haven’t even checked into using an external database server for this as I didn’t even think to do so).
Once I’ve got this sorted out I hope to post up more about the latest version – in lab testing, it seems to be a small step forward for Windows, but a much larger leap for Linux migrations.
Categorised as: Virtualization