Virtualizing TRIM for Real

TRIM is our Records Management software. Although TRIM can do document management as well as records management, we use only the records management component. That makes TRIM very light-weight, because the records management component is a database application with a Windows client application. We run it as three servers: A database on Oracle, which is on a standalone server, the TRIM server, which is a set of small Windows services that manage all the data in the database, and a Windows terminal server, which runs the client. This arrangement works well, but the TRIM server services are so light-weight that it seems a shame to devote a whole server-grade box for them.

A few weeks ago I did a proof of concept to convert the TRIM server and the terminal server into VMWare virtual machines. This worked out well, and we discussed it in our most recent group meeting in the context of the other stuff we are doing right now. Virtualization of the TRIM server fits in well with our other initiatives, so now I am doing it for real.

The first step is to take images of our existing physical TRIM servers, and then I’ll be able to use VMWare’s Physical-to-Virtual assistant to convert the images into virtual machines.