Dell Server Migration Utility (SMU)

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1 Using SMU to simplify migration to a boot from SAN architecture Aaron Prince, Technical Marketing Dell Virtualization Solutions

2 This document is for informational purposes only and may contain typographical errors and technical inaccuracies. The content is provided as is, without express or implied warranties of any kind Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Dell and its affiliates cannot be responsible for errors or omissions in typography or photography. Dell, the Dell logo, and PowerEdge are trademarks of Dell Inc. Intel and Xeon are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. Microsoft, Windows, and Windows Server are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Other trademarks and trade names may be used in this document to refer to either the entities claiming the marks and names or their products. Dell disclaims proprietary interest in the marks and names of others. November 2011 Rev 1.0 ii

3 Contents Introduction... 4 What is SMU?... 4 Use cases... 5 Migration to boot from SAN... 5 Data migration... 6 SMU Usage and Product Function... 6 AIM Overview The Next Step to Stateless Computing... 7 Conclusion... 7 Appendix... 8 Appendix A: SMU screenshots... 8 Figures Figure 1. SMU product highlights... 4 Figure 2. Migration to boot from SAN... 5 Figure 3. Migrate data to centralized storage... 6 Figure 4. Windows migration... 8 Figure 5. SMU Equallogic provisioning... 9 Figure 6. Virtual Machine driver injection...10 iii

4 Introduction The tie between a server and the workload that server is performing is something that is based on three major things. One of these is the location of Operating System (OS) boot information on local storage. This causes workloads to be statically assigned to a specific piece of infrastructure, which can result in underutilized resource in the data center infrastructure. Having a dynamic data center where infrastructure resources and workloads can be reassigned based on changing business needs can greatly improve efficiency and flexibility of the data center. What is SMU? Dell s Server Migration Utility (SMU) is a tool that enables the migration of Windows boot images in a multi-vendor x86 server environment, and prepares this migrated image for booting from centralized storage. This can be used to simplify the process of moving existing workloads to boot from SAN, either due to an initiative in moving existing hardware to a boot from SAN model, or an architecture change like moving to a virtualized environment. SMU can also be used to simplify the process of migrating application data to centralized storage for better availability and easier backup and management of data. SMU has a simple and intuitive GUI, and is able to perform migrations without changing the source image at all. It requires no agents or software to be installed, and migrates the data maintaining a standard file system structure and does not add a proprietary container around the image on the SAN. This allows a standardized process for physical and virtual servers from multiple vendors without requiring a conversion of the image for each server type. SMU multi-threaded capabilities enable an extremely fast copy of data to centralized storage so migrations take as little time as possible. Figure 1. SMU product highlights Ease of Use Simple and Intuitive GUI Drive letter mapping on target volumes Discovery of new storage devices Extensive logging for troubleshooting, analysis and reporting Higher Performance Multi-threaded fast copy to SAN Configure local disks as swap devices Boot target volumes on VMs without any conversion Configure tuning parameters on target volumes for optimal performance Non Intrusive Agent-less model Offline injection of HBA device drivers on target volumes No dependency on additional infrastructure Works with IP SAN, FC SAN, FCoE endpoints or iscsi targets 4

5 Use cases Migration to boot from SAN Moving to a SAN boot architecture is the first step toward stateless computing. Having data located in central storage rather than on local disk enables superior data protection and redundancy of the Operating System and application stack. Not only is the data more secure and available, it is no longer physically tied to a single physical server, which allows much simpler recovery from a failed server. SMU makes this process much easier by giving you a single tool that can migrate the data as well as prepare the image to make it ready to boot from SAN without any manual configuration. Figure 2. Migration to boot from SAN Technology Refresh After SMU is used to migrate servers to boot from SAN, technology refreshes can be much simpler. The workload is no longer located on local storage, physically tied to the server. With the OS image located on the SAN, moving workloads to new server technology is as simple as remapping this boot data to the new server and making sure all necessary drivers are included in the image. Datacenter Migration Performing a data center migration with SMU can deliver great time and cost savings. At the source data center, SMU is used to migrate the OS and boot information from local storage to a Fibre Channel or iscsi SAN storage array. Storage replication can then be used to make this information available at the destination data center site. When the migration was performed, SMU prepared the server image offline for SAN booting so the image is ready to be run at the new data center. 5

6 Server Consolidation When a virtualization initiative is taking place in a data center, SMU offers unique benefits. Not only can SMU be used to migrate the data to centralized storage, it can also be used to prepare the image for booting from VMware ESX or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines without any manual OS configuration required. Additionally, SMU does not change the formatting of the data or place a proprietary container around this image. This allows images to be created that can run on either physical or virtual. This provides the ultimate flexibility, the ability to choose when to run a workload on a physical server and when to run the same image, without conversion, on a virtual machine. By automatically preparing the server image for both environments, SMU eliminates the need for the image to be converted before each migration. Data migration SMU can also be used to migrate application data to centralized storage. Moving data to centralized storage provides superior data protection and redundancy, and enables a simpler strategy to back up critical data. Snapshots and cloning capabilities in storage arrays can also be used to further protect data. SMU can also be used to migrate data from central storage back to local storage, as well as to other types of central storage. This can be very useful when moving from an older SAN array to a newer SAN architecture or model. Figure 3. Migrate data to centralized storage SMU Usage and Product Function SMU is a very simple tool to use, and has a very intuitive UI. The process for migrating an image from local storage to centralized storage is as follows: Boot the server to the SMU image 6

7 Follow SMU UI directions to mount the appropriate storage Follow SMU UI directions to migrate source data to destination storage Inject necessary drivers for physical or virtual devices in SMU UI o o o Virtual machine device drivers (included with SMU) Interface card drivers needed for SAN boot (included with SMU) Drivers required to move to new server model (may require SMU customization) If destination is iscsi storage, prepare image for iscsi booting in SMU UI Shut down server SMU has this functionality using multiple vendors of servers and storage. SMU can be used to migrate the image of any x86 server with the ability to boot to an ISO image. For storage, SMU is able to work with any Fibre Channel or iscsi SAN storage arrays. With Dell Equallogic storage, SMU has an enhanced functionality capability. When migrating to Equallogic storage, SMU is able to dynamically provision the volume on the storage array from within the SMU UI. This allows administrators to avoid the extra steps required to create the SAN volume, and complete this task as part of the SMU migration steps. AIM Overview The Next Step to Stateless Computing After SMU migrates your Windows based workloads to SAN boot, the following new use cases can be achieved by implementing a dynamic workload mobility and recovery management solution. Business Continuity High Availability and Disaster Recovery Capacity on Demand / Private cloud Flexible and dynamic Lab Management and Test/Dev/QA Multi hypervisor, multi-vendor physical and virtual environments AIM provides workload mobility, which allows workloads to be retargeted interchangeably between different vendors of physical servers, different vendors of virtual servers, and between physical and virtual servers on demand. This functionality enables the use cases listed above, workloads can be moved in response to failures from a single server to an entire data center, in response to changing business needs to scale up and down capacity in the data center, and rapidly repurpose hardware between different workloads. To find out more about AIM, visit dell.com/aim. Conclusion SMU is a flexible, powerful tool that allows administrators to migrate boot images or application data to centralized storage in a standard way that works in a multi-vendor environment. This standardization of process and image creation can significantly reduce administrator time spent on these initiatives and reduce the complexity of the effort. To get access to SMU and learn more about this tool, visit the SMU download page 7

8 Appendix Appendix A: SMU screenshots Figure 4. Windows migration 8

9 Figure 5. SMU Equallogic provisioning 9

10 Figure 6. Virtual Machine driver injection 10