K1000/K2000 Physical to Virtual Conversion
Hi All-
We're about due for a hardware refresh of our KACE appliances and we've been looking into the option about converting to their virtual platforms. I'd be interested in hearing any success/horror stories from other users who have gone through a conversion and can suggest any "gotchas" to watch out. Have your experiences using a virtual platform versus the physical appliance been positive or been nightmarish?
I've read some of the prep documentation and am trying to figure out a correlation of what my hardware specs should be like for a small environment like ours where we have approximately 800 managed hosts in 5 different locations in one state. Will the recommended 4 vCPU / 4GB RAM be enough or do I have to scale up? How has patching and managed installations worked out for you once going virtual? Will I only need one VM or do I have to worry about creating additional VM's for any other tasks (Not sure if I need a dedicated SQL or DB server now that I'm going off of a physical appliance)
I have a call scheduled with Dell to discuss but would love to hear some user opinions on this.
Thank you as always!
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Answers (3)
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Posted by:
chucksteel
8 years ago
We moved our K1000 from physical to virtual and it was a fairly seamless transition. The new KBox was spun up and we restored our latest backup and everything started working. We have over 2400 systems in our inventory with a lot of custom inventory rules and our box performs pretty well with just 8GB of RAM.
Posted by:
GoranK
8 years ago
Hi
We have recently moved to a Hyper-V environment for our K1000. We manage around 1000 machines and use the service desk really heavily.
I will say that the technical requirements document provided is incorrect as our K1000 ran very slow (Took 60 minutes to start up). We had to go up to 8 VCPUs and 16GB Ram in order to achieve the same performance we previously had.
As I do not know what kind of environment you have you could go either vMware or host it on Hyper-V, both will achieve the same result.
Moving to a virtual environment will be easy as you can just restore your backup and if anything does go wrong you always have your old system to fall back on. However I do recommend once you do restore from backup to restart the Kace server and tell it to check the database.
Also if you do go Hyper-V do not forget to the following:
https://support.software.dell.com/k1000-systems-management-appliance/kb/153445
Comments:
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Thanks, Goran. I appreciate the clarification on the technical requirements as I thought the default specs seemed a bit low. Thank you as well for the KB article. At this point, we haven't made a decision between Hyper-V or VMWare.
Have you noticed any problems with patching? One previous thread I had read about talked about them using a VK1000 and they were having odd time sync errors that was leading to scheduled patching happening at all different times. Could've been just related to their environment but I'm curious as to your experience. - dtobias_keenan 8 years ago-
We just recently rolled out the recent Microsoft Security bulletin patch, https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/MS15-078
We scheduled this to occur at 3AM and had zero issues with patch depoloyment. As of today we have patched every machine with no issues.
So our experience with Hyper-V and patching has been fine. - GoranK 8 years ago
