Not quite sure the previous poster had to send his opinion in a private message but ok... A lot of your questions have to be answered by you and what you feel your environment needs. A lot of the answers come from what you can and can't live without. OpenFiler works, I have heard of quite a few people using it, I use FreeNAS for my R/D setup which is simular I believe. If you are going to want to copy or clone you might want to look into vCenter foundation so you have the ability to do that. If you don't you can still "clone" a VM it just takes a lot more time and steps. Also along those same lines between 1 or 2 hosts... you said you don't mind some downtime so maybe 1 nice esx host will be the way to go. If you want a little more uptime 2 hosts might give you some more "uptime" especially if you go w/o hot-swap drives. How much "storage" space are you looking to have on your ESX hosts. If you're just looking to use the openfiler and not much local space then a couple small hot-swap drives might be worth it just so you can keep the server up if you have a drive failure.

Like I said a lot of these questions you have about the setup is how you think your setup should be.

• Kyle

I Intended to speak with this fellow in person on the phone,, maybe an easyer way to assist in some issues that I could see, also that I think there are more items that a person would need to know about, As we all know each individual situation has many variables so I was offering my assistance but I wanted to get a fuller picture of the wanted installation.

Perry Skipton

Hey no problem khughes, I normaly do post it all here but this seemed like a special case with limited funds... Yes less expensive can be better if it fits the person and job its required to do. And also unsuported hardware that works is also sometimes a worable solution also. It all depends on the circumstances.. The hardware he chose for the server I think is right on,, Storage is always a matter of what fits the usage? However maybe a chat with Dell would fit best in this case also...

I'm thinking you may be better off doing a powerhouse of a workstation with accessoriues and using something like Server2 rather than ESX/ESXi.

Reasons:

cheaper - all around

consistancy with the product the 6 other people are running on their laptops

Do a monster machine, single quad core with 8gb of RAM, a few SAS disks and a raid card. Then use Server2 as your VM'ing level, and create your master VM's as you see fit. Now the kicker is to use some sort of FAST removable storage for these 6 people - like expresscard SSD's or firewire drives that these laptop users run them on. Have 2-3 sets of disks, color coded to keep everyone on the same revisions. Once you have your master - copy it out to the disks fresh and clean. If the VM's never see the real network (ala NAT or Host only) you don't need to clone or template them - just copy the folder of the VM when it's shutdown.

The next step is doing "customer mirror" disks where you actually snapshot their running enviroment (their running ESX right and have a copy at your office that you can work against. When you are focused on that customer, you can remote into the monster machine, power on their VMs and have at it.