Hi
@jcl333
Thanks. I'm glad you found this thread helpful. I'm really happy with the system and I've minimal complaints about the Norco chassis (was going to say zero complaints but nothing is perfect) and SM motherboard.
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Here is my progress...
SVN - My Subversion (SVN) repositories from the old bare metal servers have been synchronized to a VM on the new server. I've cutover to using it instead of the repository on my old server and it is working great. I've set up the linux vm hosting the subversion repositories to synchronize (using svnsync which utilizes rsync i think) nightly back to the old servers for redundancy just incase the ESXi host goes down or if I lose the VM, etc. Working copies sync to my dropbox cloud.
Plexmediaserver - I've setup my plex server on a small VM and I'm pretty happy with it. It is quite sparse compared to some of the hardcore plex servers I see on the forum. Nothing much to share except one thing I noticed, if a movie stream requires transcoding (such as if someone is watching a movie remotely and at a low bandwidth or lower resolution) a single virtual core goes up to 100% temporarily and at 3.5GHz according to monitor in vSphere Client. It eventually settles back down to almost idle after a few minutes. Other cores remained at idle during transcoding. I think that is normal as transcoding is pretty much single threaded per stream. I just hadn't noticed it before.
Oracle Apps and Databases - I'm still in process of planning this migration. I will use Oracle Rapid Clone to facilitate the move to the new guest VMs on the ESXi host. I've tar'ed the filesystems. I'm waiting before proceeding too far because I want to have some backup methodology in place first and to get my ducks and standards all in a row.
Backup and Recovery (for the ESXi guest VMs) - I'm still hopeful to use Veeam Backup Community Edition but I'm having trouble wrapping my head around how to configure it.
- veeam server - This drives the backup process. It requires a Windows OS but it can be a VM. So I plan to use a guest VM running on my laptop using VMware Workstation Pro for this.
- veeam proxy server - I'm not a network person by any stretch. Not sure if this veeam proxy server is required or if I can just point the veeam server directly to the backup repository server without a proxy server.
- veeam repository server (target location for the backups) - I would like to use one of my old bare metal linux servers as the backup repository. Not sure if I can simply setup an SMB or NFS on it or what.
Else, instead of veeam for backups, I could use a clonezilla iso file I've saved to a datatore that I can use when booting up any guest VM. I'd attach a "toaster" HDD caddy via USB3, make that HDD accessible to the guest VM, bootup the guest using the clonezilla iso, and make image of the /dev/sda1-sdd1 (for example) and send that backup image to the HDD in the toaster caddy. Pretty crude but it would work.
My other backup options might be to write custom shell scripts using dd or incremental backups using rsync and tar and then sync the images or tarballs to another storage such as an external drive, NAS or dropbox cloud. Not sure yet. Still would like to hear of other solutions from folks in the forum.
Have a great week.