Surgient Success

Hi,

I got the below statement from the VQMS install Guide.

"Surgient is not compatible with VMware’s Virtual Center and Lab Manager products. Hosts that are managed by Surgient cannot also be managed by VMware products."

Just to clarify, Does this mean that

1) Surgient agent should not be installed on machine that has VMware’s Virtual Center and Lab Manager products, but installed on a clean Windows Server 2003 image.

2) If I have an ESX 3.0.2 host previously managed by Lab Manager, what changes should I make to the host so that it can be managed by Surgient without re-installing ESX 3.0.2. Can I just un-install the LabManager agent in the host and install the Surgient agent?

Thanks,

Praveen. 

On ESX Servers, it's sufficient to uninstall any management agents that may actively attempt to modify the configuration of virtual machines under Surgient management.  This is to avoid "two masters" or the left hand-right hand syndrome.

Additionally, ESX Server hosts should not be pooled in VirtualCenter as active targets for VMotion, DRS, etal where the capacity of the managed hosts are dynamically adjusted or varied from what Surgient expects.

Simple, read-only monitoring and performance monitoring is not a problem. 

What about half and half mixing of an environment?  And I'm not talking about Lab Manager here, specifically, is it acceptable or a bad idea to pollute a Surgient environment by trying to add Surgient managed and non-managed virtual machines onto the same host? 

Asked another way, should a Surgient environment (read, VQMS host server) ONLY contain virtual machines that Surgient manages?  I've seen where trying to use VirtualCenter to add and manage new virtual machines onto a host server with a Surgient agent running may cause an issue.  Is that still the case?  Should VQMS users make sure to keep Surgient implementations clean and pristine and not pollute them with unmanaged virtual machines? 

Are you saying that even after uninstalling the agents other than Surgient, you are still observing issues managing virtual machines with the surgient agent?

vangaripraveen:

Are you saying that even after uninstalling the agents other than Surgient, you are still observing issues managing virtual machines with the surgient agent?

Not quite.  My question is based off of older information, I haven't tried the latest and greatest version of VQMS.  I was simply trying to find out from Richard Cardona if there would be an issue, say, if I tried to install the Surgient Agent on my host server, and then instead of it being a dedicated Surgient host server, someone else in the company was also using that server to host virtual machines that should be owned, managed, and controlled by VMware VirtualCenter and shouldn't be a part of the Surgient VQMS farm. 

This is obvsiouly bad practice.  However, with people who have a limited amount of equipment, I've seen this happen.  So, I wanted to either 1. make it clear to people on here that this is bad practice and shouldn't be done, or 2. find out if something has changed and this is no longer an issue.

Not sure if that clarifies it or not.  I hope so.  Thanks for asking me.

I really appreciate for sharing the information, as it seems I might be also in the same boat as you. Only thing is I do not have the Surgient setup completely yet. Once we start using Surgient, I am sure I will experience the same issue you just described above.

David,

Surgient supports dedicating an ESX Server and Microsoft Virtual Server to our dynamic provisioning platform.  If you have pre-existing VMs when you pool a host in VQMS we will not delete them or attempt to use them or re-provision them in deployments.

You can pool less than a full host's capacity in Surgient, but we highly recommend dedicating the host to Surgient after installing our Agent on it.  While we will not interfere with VirtualCenter operations, it is possible the reverse is not true for Surgient-managed VMs.

Surgient has the ability to fractionally share hosts between multiple VCS installations so multiple management is possible -- all with our software.

 In general, sharing a host between two management systems that believe they have "full control" over a host is a bad idea - low resources notwithstanding.

Richard Cardona:

Surgient has the ability to fractionally share hosts between multiple VCS installations so multiple management is possible -- all with our software.

 In general, sharing a host between two management systems that believe they have "full control" over a host is a bad idea - low resources notwithstanding

Thanks Richard.  It sounds like the best practice is to make sure that you maintain your environments apart from one another.  So, if you have a Surgient environment, make it your Surgient environment and nothing else.  While Surgient has done a much better job to make sure they don't clobber virtual machines they don't manage, the same cannot be said for other management platforms, whether it is VirtualCenter or some other platform. 

And I guess it would also make sense therefore as a best practice to make sure that you create exclusions or make sure that VMware's DRS/HA doesn't add (and obviously remove) any virtual machines into a Surgient environment - so don't allow someone to make it part of the resource pool.

Appreciate the heads up and info!