First a little about myself:
I am currently a Network Administrator (title only, true job description is more like "if it plugs into the wall I handle it" everything from Phones, Copiers, Desktops, Printers, Servers etc.) for a medium sized company 70 workstations, ~20 Servers. Recently we have run into money crunches with the rest of the world and had no warranty on any hardware in our building. My boss and myself were reluctant to even consider virtualization a year ago due to ignorance and the normal fears I would assume anyone has jumping into it. Well due to nothing but dollars we have moved into a virtual environment (baby step) with much more to come.
August 19th 2009 will live on as the wonderful day that I received my first true ESXi host. We had been playing with VSphere 4.0 for a few weeks on a decently upgraded workstation but nothing compared to my new baby: 2 Nehalem X5550's, 24 Gigs of RAM, 600 gigs of SAS local storage and 6 beautiful fingers.... I mean NICs. My new child could not be prettier We have quickly gone to work and have successfully P2V'd 6 servers including our original Domain Controller (that was fun). We have targeted our e-mail server next and it will really be a nail bitter for me.
Our plans to move forward include the purchase of Essentials, a SAN and an additional ESXi host to allow HA and other such features.
So far I could not be happier. I sleep better at night no longer having dreams of failing hardware I might walk into the next morning. We are not even close to touching what this box can handle with average utilization normally in the single digits for everything except RAM.
I hope to use this space to track my growth and knowledge of ESXi.
