Dilemma: buy vSphere with ESXi4 or with ESX4?

[biokovo]

Please some give me a good advice.

We are planning to buy vSphere for 8 CPU, and with VMotion, HA and DRS.

As I can see, there is no difference between esxi4 and esx4, except in service console managament.

Becouse esxi is very stable, small (you can put it on flash) and easy to manage, is it a better choose?!

What is a difference in price (for 8 CPU, VMotion, HA and DRS)?

Thanks

[jbogardus]

There is no difference in price. At least not as far as what VMware is charging. The hardware vendors do charge a little extra for the preinstalled embedded ESXi obtion, but you also have the option of installing ESXi yourself on a normal RAID array without that charge.

ESXi or ESX are just different options to deploy the same licenses. The licenses you purchase from VMware will not change at all. You can choose either method to deploy the licenses after you purchase them.

ESXi is the smaller footprint 'edition' that VMware plans to make the most popular deployment method to provide simpler management methods and greater security by eliminating the patching and fud people have with the Linux console that is included with ESX.

It is taking some time for third party software vendors (VizionCore, Veeam, ...) and large enterprise operations to adapt to the changes that ESXi envolves, so VMware needs to continue to provide ESX for some time until their customers used to ESX are ready to fully manage ESXi environments.

For environment just starting out with VMware ESX deployments at this time, in most cases it will make more sense to deploy ESXi since it is made to be easier for people new to VMware ESX to be able to manage, and it's the direction VMware is encouraging customers to go. If you are purchasing third party solutions that (like backup or monitoring) that integrate with ESX just make sure that the software has been modified to support ESXi to meet your requirements.

[Gostev]

It is taking some time for third party software vendors (VizionCore, Veeam, ...) and large enterprise operations to adapt to the changes that ESXi envolves, so VMware needs to continue to provide ESX for some time until their customers used to ESX are ready to fully manage ESXi environments.

Since you mention our company here, I have to correct you here a little... may be some other vendors are indeed slow to adapt, but all Veeam products support ESXi since beginning of 2009 - and we definitely recommend all of our customers to go with ESXi as opposed to full ESX.

As biokovo correctly points out, ESXi advantages over regular ESX are overwhelming. Aside of multiple technical benefits, no need for local storage alone (boot from flash) will save you about $500 per host (cheapest mirror), and if you are rolling out hundreds of hosts - it will cut significant piece of your bill... not even talking about local storage reliability (hard drive vs. flash).

[jbogardus]

Yes, I meant the examples more to give an idea of the type of third party integrations I was referring to that would need to be considered rather than as real examples of ones that have actual ESXi issues. The variety of considerations that need to be taken into account in integrating software components requires analysis of each person's needs matched to the specific capabilities of the product at the point in time. My point is that the individual has to consider how that is different for ESXi during the timeframe of their project. Also the vendors are tending to become fairly caught up with the ESXi change (so this is not as great an issue as a few months ago) and the next phase as I indicated is for the large enterprises to integrate ESXi into their environments.

I've been very happy with my experience with Veeam which includes implementing with ESXi for a client.

I'll try to be a little more careful about the context and in which I reference vendors since I know a lot of vendors on contributing to these discussions. I've especially seen several interesting discussions between Veeam, VizionCore, and esXpress engineers for some reason. I put you company's name first this time because I like them the best

[fajarpri]

Related to this thread.

I'm also ordering IBM Blade HS22 with ESXi embedded (in an internal usb flash disk).

But the I realize, how about Disaster Recovery say the flash disk is broken? The VM maybe safe in the NAS, but how to recover from that disaster, say after I buy the flash disk replacement. What to do? Just reinstall ESXi?

[J1mbo]

Yes, just plug new USB drive in, enter the management IP address, add it back in vCentre and re-apply host profile. Or you could use the VMA appliance to run a regular backup of it.

Please award points to any useful answer.

[pigbloke]

Biokovo

I started a similar thread about a month ago -

The helpful responses I received may help you to make an informed decision.

Nick

[AlbertWT]

Applying host profile might cost you a license right ? as it is not included in the vSphere 4 Standard and below features. cmiiw ... 😮

Kind Regards,

AWT

[jbogardus]

Host Profiles is part of the Enterprise Plus edition which is the most expensive and includes the full set of functionality that may be desired to simplify management in large environments. For smaller environments dealing with infrequently configuring ESX hosts is not very difficult. There are not many configuration steps and it does not take very long without using Host Profiles or vMA scripts. As long as you keep good documentation of the configuration settings you make and don't loose track of the info, you really don't need more automated methods for small environments to keep configurations consistent or restore configurations of hosts.