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The Day After with ESXi

Posted by ToddMuirhead Aug 14, 2008

We are having a chat this afternoon, at 3 pm central time, that is officially titled ESXi Features and Licensing. I think that I should have named it The Day After with ESXi because that more clearly gets to the questions that I people are having. Many have downloaded the newly free ESXi in the last month. Installation and creating an initial VM are usually the first steps that are taken. Then you go home, sleep on it, and start to really evaluate how to use ESXi the next day.

Initially a single server running ESXi maybe all that is needed. Questions about how it works and what it can do will need to be answered. This is the Features part of the chat today. Some will arrive at the conclusion that they may need some of the features that are included with VMware's Virtual Infrastructure which includes things like live migration, high availability, load balancing, and centralized management. There are actually lots of options in terms of licensing to upgrade the free ESXi into Virtual Infrastructure. This is the Licensing part of today's chat.

Todd

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I ran across Scott Lowe's blog entry on Melio FS, Hyper-V, and VMware ESX earlier today. Scott talks about his discussion with Jeff Woolsey - Senior Program Manager for Virtualziation at Microsoft - while at Tech Ed. Specifically how Microsoft has allowed storage partners to create a cluster file system that can be used by Windows 2008 \ Hyper-V. Such a cluster file system could enable the VMFS type functionality of having multiple physical hosts access a shared disk at the same time. This would remove the requirement of one LUN for one VM when doing quick migration with Hyper-V. Specifically Sanbolics' Melio FS was identified as capable of doing this.

I think this is excellent news and means that Hyper-V customers will have a cluster file system option for their Hyper-V hosts. This can greatly simplify storage management when you have more than just a few VMs. On the downside is the additional cost of such a cluster file system. There is not pricing listed on the Sanbolic website, but the Network World article states that the price is $5000 per host. If the cost is anywhere near that, then the price of VMware's ESX doesn't seem that bad in comparison to Hyper-V - assuming that you need or want the cluster file system capability.

Todd

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