Blog Posts

Our recent chat on the benefits of using EqualLogic iSCSI storage for virtualization solutions like VMware and XenServer was great. We had a longtime EqualLogic guy - Tim Sherback - and quite a few expert users who talked in detail about all of the features of EqualLogic that work so well with VMware and XenServer. Things like thin-provisioning, simplified management, and ease of expansion were mentioned. The most compelling aspect to me is the deep integration that has been done with the Auto Snapshot Manager for VMware, Auto Replication with VMware Site Recovery Manager, and the EqualLogic adapter for XenServer 5.0 Dell Edition. In each case the virtualization software (either VMware of XenServer) is able to use the hardware features of an EqualLogic array to accomplish what would have been done in software. For example you can use the snapshot feature of the array to make a VM snapshot. Check out the chat transcript for more details and also check out the demo vidoes to see it in action.

The other really great aspect of the chat was a discussion around when to pick EqualLogic or MD3000i. There was lots of info which should help anybody trying to decide which to use. I recommend that you read the transcript to get the details - this part of the chat is towards the end if you want to just skip right to it.

Todd

During last week's chat the we discussed ESXi licensing and features. In the features portion of the discussion flakrat asked if it was possible to setup two ESXi servers with shared storage to be able to do a manual fail-over of a VM between the two servers. I was able to create this setup and confirm that it works. Read on for details.

The setup that I used to test was two PowerEdge R805 servers with ESXi Update 2 refresh installed on the hard drive. This was the currently available "free" ESXi installable from VMware's web site. To install I used the Dell Remote Access Card (DRAC) virtual media capability to boot from the ESXi ISO I downloaded. I selected the local hard disk as the location to install and let it complete. Once installed, I used the ESXi configuration to set the password, IP, gateway, and hostname for each server. I then installed the Virtual Infrastructure client on a windows server and used that to manage each of the R805 servers individually.

For shared storage I used a PowerVault MD3000i iSCSI storage array. I enabled the iSCSI software initiator on each server and discovered the the MD3000i. On server A, I created a VMFS partition and created a new VM called VMTest1. I installed Windows Server 2008 64-bit Enterprise Edition. After install completed I shutdown the VM on server A. I then went to server B and rescanned the storage adapters. It found the new VMFS partition on the shared iSCSI LUN. I created a VM using the same settings as I had on Server A including the same virutal hard disk file. I then boot the VM successfully.

The most interesting part of this test was to verify that the cluster file system of VMFS was still working without Virtual Center in the picture. So with the VM still running on Server B, I tried to start it on Server A - and I got an error message that the file was in use by another server. This was great because it showed that it would not be possible to run the VM at the same time on both servers.

We will chat more about this on today's chat - ESX and ESXi.

Todd

VMware announced a couple of weeks ago that ESXi was being made available as a free download. There was lots of talk and discussion about what this means. Detailed price analysis have been done. On twitter I have seen several posts where people were downloading, installing, or deploying ESXi. It's twitter so you don't get a lot of detail, but it does seem to indicate that people are doing something with it.

I just wonder exactly what to do with ESXi and does it really change things dramatically.

What you get with the free ESXi download - A high performance enterprise class hypervisor with a web based management tool to create, modify, monitor, and generally do cool stuff with all the VMs that are running on that server. This is a really good deal, especially considering the price.

For a single physical server or maybe a few servers, the free ESXi should be a really great solution.

What is not included is Virtual Center and all of the features of that are multi-server related. This means that there is no VMotion, no HA, no DRS, no multi-server management of any kind.

The great thing is that it is possible to buy the correct licenses (I'll let the license experts handle exactly what this means) and then be able to enable all of these great features with Virtual Center and ESXi. So you can use ESXi as a starting point and grow into a full blown enterprise virtualization solution - later. In many ways this seems to be the same exact thing that VMware did when they made GSX Server free and renamed it to VMware Server. They even renamed ESX 3.5i to be ESXi.

There are some things that I still wonder about. Is ESXi easy enough to use for those just getting started with virtualization? Will ESXi get more SMBs to try out VMware's virtualization?

Todd