Installing ESXi v 4

[sergef1973]

I am just getting my hands dirty with VMWare and I have a couple of questions about installing ESXi. I have a brand new Dell Poweredge1950 Server.

I am planning to put two 640GB hard Drives (Since server has a build in SAS Raid conroller, I am planning to mirror the hard drives), add an addional 8 GB memory and put one extra network card for managing (server already have two network cards but I am planning to create a failover with ESXi) . My questions are following:

1) Can I allocate lets say 80 GB for the ESXi boot image and use the rest for virtual machines?

2) Does ESXi supports network card failover?

3) I have 5 Physical Servers that I want to move into virtual environment. What P2V tool can I use to do that?

Any help will be appreciated.

[DSTAVERT · Accepted solution]

ESXi only requires a 1GB partition although I haveheard it should be 2.

Network failover is supported.

There is Converter standalone available form the downloads area. Great tool.

[DLeid]

Hi

I am planning to put two 640GB hard Drives (Since server has a build in SAS Raid conroller, I am planning to mirror the hard drives), add an addional 8 GB memory and put one extra network card for managing (server already have two network cards but I am planning to create a failover with ESXi) . My questions are following:

You should really use different drives to store your virtual machines. Ideally use you should use hardware that offers you six drives. Two of the drives mirrored for ESXi system files (vmkernel and console) and the others can be raided and formated as vmfs for the virtual machines. This keeps your system drives and your virtual machine drives physically separate.

Since your using a Dell 1950 with only two drive bays you could allocate about 20GB to ESXi and partition the rest as vmfs for the virtual machine files.

2) Does ESXi supports network card failover?

Teamed nics are supported with failover but I have only used virtual center to accomplish.

3) I have 5 Physical Servers that I want to move into virtual environment. What P2V tool can I use to do that?

VMware Converter should be able to handle that just fine. Make sure you pay attention to peripheal dives when converting.