Hi,
I am a developper, but always been insterested in infrastructure.
I always thought that I should not depend on the infrascture and therefore able to set up my own servers myself.
And with VMWare i did it !
It is now a bit more than 10 years i am using VMWare technologie as a free user to manage my home networks.
I am running an ESXI on a fanless computeur i5. I don't have a lot of servers, only 3 (1 linux debian as web server, 1 windows server as data server, 1 zabbix server),I added an electric inverter to be able to serve my web content with 99.99% availability. With VMWare i feel like nothing is impossible. Reliability is at the rendezvous.
I never lost data, i am using my own script (in shell) to back up the VM to a distant using a mount in NFS, mounted at each reboot using /etc/rc.local.d/local.sh.
Snapshots works really great, each time i want to update/upgrade a systeme, make critical change, i can save the state before doing big change, being able to get back if something wrong happend.
When i install a new system i can use snapshot to save states to test it and validate it before making it consistent.
Recently i added Zabbix to my system to check if all is going well, and being able o get alerts when ever someting is going wrong. And even there VMWare was there to help me monitoring it !
SNMP is available to send data to it, it is not perfect ( i dont get cpu infos and ram infos) but it is really great to be able to monitor it with services included in ESXI
Even Esxi updates/upgrades work like a charm, i started on Esxi 5.0 and upgraded it to 6.7 with each intermediate version, and each times it worked without any troubles !
The system is a core linux with minimal functionnalities, but all the services i need are there, it is possible to add some extra services if they are missing as it is linux compliant (ncftp for exemple).
If i need to virtualize a phisical machine, VMWare has the tools for it ! and again it worked for me without any troubles.
and there is so much more to say ... (IPFail over, virtual network, live vm edit ... + all i still not know)
Since i use your tools i feel like i really upgraded my knowlegde and possibilities.
So even if my post is useless, i really want to say a big thanks to VMWare staff, you are really doing a great job !
I wish you the best for the future
wiki.frogg.fr
