opendental within vmware or virtualbox

[abelaguilar]

wondering if anyone has tried running open dental withing a virtual server environment.

[wjstarck]

Yes.

We have been running our OD server on both Windows 2003, and then Windows 2008 first with VMware server 1 and then VMware server 2 for well over a year and a half now. It works quite nicely. I'd recommend Windows 2008 Server because it offers vast speed improvements over its predecessor. VMware server 2 offers vast improvements in stability over 1. Our host box is Ubuntu 9.04 which as of last count was not an officially suppported OS by VMware. That may have changed by now, especially with the impending release of Ubuntu 9.10.

Good luck, let us know if you need assistance setting things up.

[abelaguilar]

Great to hear!!

The reason why I want to transition to vmware is to avoid any downtime in case of server hardware failure.

so, the plan would be to have opendental running in vmware. Backup every day the entire vmware file to another computer. If I come in monday morning and my server is down due to hardware failure, i'd like to fireup vmware in another computer and get backup and runing fairly quickly.

Does this sound like something anyone else is doing?

[wjstarck]

Make sure you do some testing first. It seems I remember that VMs may not be moved from one install to the other unless you are using one of the paid for enterprise versions. VMware Server is the free version, so give that a try before you go into production. The docs on VMware's site are really comprehensive, so they should give you a pretty good idea before you start....

[Justin Shafer]

Runs well. Run it with 2 VMWare Workstations running Linux to acheive a Linux-HA Cluster. That is 2 servers acting as one, to increase redundancy. Oh I am supposed to call you. I will reply to your email...

[dsanders]

I'm late hopping on this thread, but yes this works great. I have my brother setup as follows:

Ubuntu virtual machine running on a Windows host. The virtual machine powers off every evening and then all the virtual machine files are copied to an external hard drive. He has a few of those hard drives that he swaps out every day so that he will always have at least one HD off site.

I also have vmware installed on his desktop. I built another virtual machine which powers up every night and then gets all of the server data rsynced over. I also have the system drive for the open dental virtual machine on his desktop. So if his server completely dies, we can either power up the virtual machine from his desktops internal hard drive. If for some reason that didn't work we could hook up one of the external hard drives to his desktop and run from that.

On top of all that it rsyncs every evening to my home server since I am located 200 miles away. I shutdown MySQL before all rsyncs so that the DB is in a consistent state. All in all I think it is a pretty good setup. The only issues we've had is some of the external hard drives are flaky.

I would switch him to VMware's free ESXi, but I have not had a chance to come up with a way to backup to an external HD yet.

In case anyone want to play with it, I built an Open Dental virtual appliance a few years ago. I haven't tested it since then, but I bet it may still work.
Check it out here: http://www.vmcolonel.net/?p=3

[medicusjim]

We've been using Ubuntu on VMServer with various windows boxes with great success. Even Vista and Windows 7. It works extremely well. We use Ubuntu to host our web services layer for our Open Dental integration.

-Jim

[Justin Shafer]

This is what I do, and had to do today because a Dell T300 Server decided it needed a motherboard replacement....

Cloning your existing server to a VMWare Machine...

I took a drive from the server and hooked it up to a workstation.... edit: oh yeah...I configure servers to use raid1.. if you have raid5, you will need to take 3 drives, and your raid controller (hopefully you have an external raid controller, and then drop them all into a workstation).....

Installed VMWare Workstation and setup a new Virtual Machine with 1TB of HDD Space.
Used Acronis True Image 2009 bootable cd to clone the Physical disk from the server to the Virtual disk inside VMWare...
Ran a repair install on Windows 2003, inside of VMWare... reboot
Windows 2003 booted just fine as a domain controller and is ready to serve the office until Tuesday, when dell comes with the parts... network card gets detected as an Intel 1000MT or something, and you need to set a static ip address if you had one before...

You may run into needing to reactivate the computer.. I didnt on this dell, (using the cd that came with the poweredge) but that doesnt mean you wont. Odd too because the Repair Install didnt ask for a cdkey and usually it does... Either call MS and tell them what your doing, creating a backup server in a VM, or just fix it yourself.

Since this is now setup, I will most likely keep it around and update it every night.. Or something.. n stuff... Just dont like keeping VMWare workstation running on a workstation all the time, so I may boot it up at night, copy data to it, and shut it back down, automatically......

If your not using a domain with active directory, you really dont have to clone the entire server, but its nice too. You could just install mysql on another workstation and update it, and recreate the shares on the workstation, etc, etc...

With linux, I would really just create a fresh box from scratch and then set it up to be the server, configuring samba, mysql, etc... Wouldnt take that long, really.