Have I said before that I love virtualization? Because I really, really do.
In my original Hyper-V implementation, I used two Dell R410’s, each with 32 GB of RAM (4 sticks) and 1 Xeon 5630 processor. It’s been a little bit of time since then, with some additional VM’s brought online for various services. My benchmarks showed it was time to upgrade the cluster, mostly for RAM failover amounts; I can’t go below 50% available RAM otherwise all the VM’s won’t be able to run on one host.
So I called up my Dell rep, ordered 2 x Xeon 5630 and 8 x 8 GB of RAM, and today installed them.
The install went very smoothly, and because of the Hyper-V cluster and Live Migration, occurred in the middle of the day without downtime or interruption.
This is the process I used:
- Manually drained a host (Windows Server 2012 will have this as a feature, which is nice).
- Performed Windows Updates and a BIOS update from Dell
- Restarted the server, and entered BIOS setup to ensure latest version applied successfully
- Turned off server, slide out from the rack (Man do I love the RapidRails).
- Opened up the chassis, removed the shroud covering processors and RAM
- Added 4 sticks of RAM
- Removed the CPU filler, and inserted the new processor.
- Attached the passive heatsink, and screwed it into the mounts.
- Turned on the server.
And that’s it! Just like that, I’ve doubled the capacity of my infrastructure, and it took under an hour.
