ESXi 5.5 Can You Use Off Device Resources to Run VMs?

[Dthompson04]

Hello VMware Experts,

  I was wondering if ESXi 5.5 servers can manage VMs hosted on hardware from a different server?  We've lost funding for the second year in a row to purchase upgraded equipment for new servers so we have to do with what we have.

  For the last two years I've been an administrator for two miss matched hardware boxes that have minimum resources and operating since 2010.

System #1 has a lot of memory "128GB" and low drive space 400GB.  Running one VM as a 2008 DC.

System #2 is low 24GB of memory and has a lot of drive space 21TB.  Running three VM's, two 2008 DC and a stand alone fileserver.

  System #1 can't increase the drive capacity, but last year we purchased a new NAS that I beefed up to support VMs in case I had to turn it into a VMware server with onboard drive space.

  System #2 can't increase the memory capacity.  Can the ESXi host run a VM on the NAS "separate hardware" using the increased memory space of the NAS?

  I'm thinking I would be able to use the drive space, but not the memory space of the NAS "2012 Storage Server".

Any Advice or comments to help get through another year would help!   Oh, I know the one about getting funding from ACCOUNTING..... LOL....

[continuum]

My first idea was to install a VM on system #2 that would act as NFS-server.
But when considering the problems with such an approach I would rather do this:
Replace the ESXi OS on system #2 with a Linux OS and use it as one large NFS-server.
Do not use system#2 to serve the free space via iSCSI. Instead serve tjhe free space via NFS - that will give you a much better long term stability compared with using VMFS over iSCSI.
System#1 should have enough power to run 10 VMs or more.
I would also suggest to stick with ESXi 5.5 and do not replace it with ESXi 6 or later.
Ulli

[Nick_Andreev]

What kind of NAS did you buy? If it supports NFS, you can mount it to your ESXi servers and create datastores on it.