IBM p550 - Migration Path to VMware?

Why on earth would you be migrating to VMWare?

If you haven't been destroyed yet by price increases, it's coming. You should be planning to move to another virtualization engine.

VMware is x86/ARM only, no support for Power.

Also as malor pointed out you should be looking to transition away from VMware not migrating additional workloads to it.

crimsonmac said:

Hi all,

Started a new position recently, and one of our important systems is an IBM System 5 p550 (9133-550 seems to match what I see in the datacenter) complete with HMC.

The rest of our servers are on a fairly modern VMware Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) with HP SimpliVity/Nimble.

I've familiarized myself with some of the basics - looks like it actually is a virtualization platform running on the PowerPC architecture - is there a standard migration path to VMware?

I'd love to virtualize it, but well, it's already virtualized - what is the best way to migrate data to our VMware platform?

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It's basically running IBM's own version of VMWare for Power architectures. Unless you can migrate the application to x64, you're stuck with it. Or, at that age, you'd best be looking at a new p-Series machine to move it to.

Proxmox is well thought-of for up to medium scale. If you need to go big, you might want to check out Nutanix. I don't know a lot about it, except that it's very expensive, and presumably there must be some value there.

It will likely be cheaper than VMWare, which is really socking it to government and big business. 10x cost increases apparently aren't uncommon.

If you are running AIX, you are stuck where you are. There is no moving except to new hardware. That power 5 box is so old I worked with it when it was the new hotness.

We have a couple of P550's and Power8 systems. We are investigating move what we can into Linux (the custom apps) and trying to sunset the old Oracle systems running on the Power8's. It's going to be a nightmare.

WingMan said:

We have a couple of P550's and Power8 systems. We are investigating move what we can into Linux (the custom apps) and trying to sunset the old Oracle systems running on the Power8's. It's going to be a nightmare.

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Wha... Why the fuck would someone buy POWER systems to run Oracle? Either run with DB2 if you're an IBM shop or in the past buy Solaris or now RH/Oracle Linux. Oracle on POWER is like the worst of all possible worlds.

Moving from a 15 year old OS to one only 5 years old?

RHEL 6,10?!?? That is OS is dead. been dead for 3 years. ELS for it ends in 60 days so its reallllllly dead then. I mean, if you like not patching because there are no patches and you don't care about security CVEs, I guess its the OS for you...

kperrier said:

RHEL 6,10?!?? That is OS is dead. been dead for 3 years. ELS for it ends in 60 days so its reallllllly dead then. I mean, if you like not patching because there are no patches and you don't care about security CVEs, I guess its the OS for you...

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We still have RHEL 5. Thankfully were just getting done building a working Satellite server with IDM that we are going to start deploying and upgrading things to 9. I walked into this mess a year ago and just finally getting dug out some.

Demento said:

Wha... Why the fuck would someone buy POWER systems to run Oracle? Either run with DB2 if you're an IBM shop or in the past buy Solaris or now RH/Oracle Linux. Oracle on POWER is like the worst of all possible worlds.

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No idea, I wasn't here when it was bought and implemented (I started at this company just over a year ago). Until this past year I hadn't touched a Unix system or Oracle in over 2 decades (HPUX back then). All I know is that it needs to go. This is an ERP system and being on AIX it makes backing it up terrible. No one ever did archiving, AIX has some weird file flags for the database that get lost in normal backups and they don't use the Oracle tools to do it. It's 11TB and AIX has the Netapp stuck on a version of it's firmware that doesn't understand RPC Sealing so now all the CIFs shares are having issues with AD creds. The backup is to use the Netapp tools available to AIX to do a snapshot, mount that snapshot to another AIX box to pull a backup to a very old TSM server running in AIX on a different P55 and then to an even older tape library. I have a list of former IT employees from here that I will never work with or at a company they've just left.

Needless to say I've been working on fixing the environment, just have to get the funds to accomplish it. Little by little.