Transcript
It's a small virtual machine for the purposes of this demo. It's a 20 gig hard drive, and it's currently sat on ESXi1, this host here. We're going to go and take a look at that host. Come up here, because I want to just point out a few things on the networking. This has a management interface 192.168, and it also has a couple of V switches. I want you to just keep an eye on this IP address here, 172.16.1.1. This is the IP address that we're going to be pulling this virtual machine across with our warm import script when we trigger that. Just keep that in mind. This is the virtual machine that we're going to bring across. We can do multiple virtual machines, but I'm just going to import this one virtual machine across. Now, we're operating on some physical servers here. We've got some HP DL145 Gen 11s, and we can have some flexibility in how we do the warm imports. I'm actually just going to import this onto a single node, so it won't be protected. I can then protect that afterwards and create that mirror between the two nodes. But for the purposes of the demo today, I'm literally going to be pulling that virtual machine over into this node 2 here. This node has an IP address of 10.40.0.34. If I come down here and open up my script, this is the Python script that I'm going to be using. Let's just move that out of the way. We're calling upon the host name of the SVHCI node. We're passing the password through there. This host name IP address, that IP address that I was referring to, so we're going to an individual ESXi host. We could go to a vCenter, the root and the password of that. The virtual machine name dash dash pool is the storage that I'm going to put this on, dash dash warm, and then power. Now, if I wanted to make this highly available and protect this virtual machine on the initial warm import, I could just put this parameter in as well, dash dash remote dash pool, and then the pool name there. But I'm not going to do that. We're just going to bring it in onto that single node. If I just go to the network here, you can see our management IP address is on this 10.40, but I have this 172.16.1 address, which is where we're going to be bringing that virtual machine across. Let's run the script and see what happens. I've already got this in ready to go. Kick that off. I don't know why that's done that, because that shouldn't be there. Somebody else might be in my lab. Let's just cancel that a minute. Let's just kick that off again. The wonders of live demos. Let's just do that again. Let's cancel that. Let's fire that off. We can see now, I don't know what happened there. Maybe somebody was in my lab earlier. But you can see that the warm import is kicking off there, it's running at 11 percent and it's doing disk one of one. What it's doing, the process that's happening here, is the script triggers a snapshot of the virtual machine, and it's called store magic warm import. It's a non-QS snapshot, so as not to impact the VM production. This is the beauty of the warm import. It's doing it in network and it's doing it across that link, but the virtual machine is staying on in VMware world, so users can continue to do that. It gives that flexibility that if you've got a maintenance window at the end of the day, where you do the final cutover, you can trigger this off at any point. This is a small virtual machine. Imagine you've got to get 20 terabytes across. This is going to take a few hours to do. You can keep that running and it's doing iterations and then copying that data across and then consolidating that data on disk. It could take eight hours and at the end, we have that final cutover. When the final cutover is done, it does the last piece, it does that final iteration to make sure the data is across, and then effectively, you power off the virtual machine, and it comes up in SVHCI world. This is what I'm going to hopefully show you in a minute. In terms of the storage, I can go and have a look at the storage statistics here to show that that data is coming across. Hopefully, you can see this in here. We can see we've got about 90 megabytes per second there coming across. If I come over to VMware, let's have a look at what it's doing. I'll show you that snapshot that it's created. It's the store magic warm import there. If I wanted to go and have a look at the networking, I could go in here and look at the graphs, but I've already showcased really what we're seeing over in SVHCI world. You see this coming across here. If we come back to our virtual machines, what we should see is this. When this hits 80 percent, we'll get a message to say we're ready to cut over, so we would need to shut down this Windows 2025 in VMware world, and you'll do that final step. This process is about five or six minutes. This is taking, you can see it's going through a number of iterations. We'll confirm those iterations on the VMware side in a minute. We've got to 80 percent. We should see now here shutdown required. This is the flexibility. We could actually script it to do all of this in one go, but what I like about this is that the user controls when they want to cut across this virtual machine into SVHCI. If I come back over here, there's our virtual machine. Now, if I have VM tools on here, I'd be able to shut this down. I'm going to have to just log on to that. The console here, control or delete. Let's log in there. Helps if I can type the password correctly. It's in now. Let's just shut that down. There we go. It's coming back up. We come in here. We're going to just shut this guest down as required. Click continue. That's shutting down now. If I come back over to here, we should see this start to finish off that warm import. It'll do this final. Now, this is relatively quick. This takes maybe a minute or so, and that will suddenly shoot up to 100 percent. We'll see the virtual machine appear here, and you can see these current virtual machines here are unprotected. If I wanted to protect those, I can just edit those, protect them, and create the mirror with its partner there. This will continue to run. Let's just do a little refresh. Yeah, it shut down over in Windows 2025. Shut down there. If I look at the events as well, I just want to show you this. What it creates, that whole iteration, snapshot, iteration, copy data, and consolidation. You can see the virtual machine disk consolidation succeeded. You can track all of the events over in VMware. That's powered off. Now, that virtual machine, if I come back over here, you can see now warm import, Win 2025 complete. That took around about six minutes to do. I can now VNC onto that virtual machine. There it is. Log in, do my checks. Now, with some operating systems, all of that virtual machine configuration has come across the MAC address. One thing that sometimes you need to go and re-IP the NIC, depends on the operating system. But we've, in six minutes, done a warm import of a guest virtual machine out of VMware into SVHCI. We are doing this for our customers, existing SV-SAN customers. We have a customer that needs to be off VMware. I think by the end of October, we're a third of the way through a thousand locations, two nodes, SV-SAN on VMware. We are helping them migrate in a structured approach into SVHCI as an alternative to VMware at the edge. So that's the end of the demo. Thank you very much. I hope it's been useful.
