Disk space, backup, and general ESXi 5 questions.

[hkec]

I have installed two virtual machines on a physical box. Both says the size is 100 GB, but the provisioned Size is 500 GB. Have I used up ~200 GB on my physical disc or I have consumed ~1000 GB already?

What command do I use to find out how much space is left on my physical server?

What can go wrong with using ESXi 5 sitting on a RAID 5 configuration? If a HD fails, I can hotswapped. What if ESXi 5 fails for some other reasons? What could that be?

What do I use to backup ESXi 5?

What is the best backup software and hardware for Windows 2008 R2 on ESXi 5?

Thanks for sharing.

[Samcer]

Hi,

I'm assuming you are using vSphere Hypervirso (say ESXi free edition).

if you have used thin provisioning, the space will be physically allocated when your VMs need to write.

As I understand you create a VM with 500 GB HD thin and your VM is using 100 GB. You may see some details in the summary tab of the VM looking at Resources Pane. Moreover you can browse your datastore to get some more info.

Concerning your datastore space utilization you could get info from the summary tab on your host or Config tab --> storage.

About your disk subsustem you could use Raid 5 and replace a broken disk without disruption as any other system.

backup: for the free edition is a pain, you are not allowed to use vStorage API for data protection, you have to protect VM from inside Guest OS, or you have to power off your VM and "clone them"

[proden20]

If you are in fact using the free ESXi you are severely limited in both management and functionality.  To comment on some of your questions:

- RAID, etc: The idea behind ESXi is that it is a disposable hypervisor.  Ultimately, you'd want a clustered solution with VM's stored on NAS or SAN that can failover your VM's should one of your ESXi servers fail for any reason (hard disks fry, motherboard fries, nics fry, etc.) There are NAS solutions priced at or under $1000 you may be able to justify for your smaller environment.  I've seen a $500 Buffalo NAS handle around 10 low I/O VM's in a vSphere cluster amicably (although I'm not recommending Buffalo for your business

- If you noticed the ease of installing ESXi, it is designed to be very easy to reinstall the hypervisor if a server needs to be replaced.  This also makes it easy to rapidly scale your environment. Once you upgrade to vSphere and have vCenter, your centralized management can kick in and leverage something called a "Host Profile" to perform all of the post-installation configuration for you.  All of this being said, if you are going to install ESXi on local storage at all (as opposed to SAN or "stateless,") I wouldn't worry about its RAID level beyond a mirror.  An exception there would be if you are going to use local hard disk for VM Swap, which is compensating for low RAM by writing VM memory to disk, in which case a stripe would be faster.  I understand your VM's are on local storage, but hopefully this gives a bigger picture of where you'd want to get to with your environment.

- The VMWare Disaster Recovery solution works for small environments, but you need to upgrade to get it.  It can save your data to Windows shares, which is a nice built-in feature for environments without enterprise storage.  Check out veeam.com for some free evalutions of easy VM Backup solutions as well.

Hopefully this gives you some things to consider.  The VMWare marketplace is expansive, and your options are endless if your money is endless!!!  Welcome.