Overwhelmed Information, Simple approach

[LNCCS]

Greetings,

We are thinking of virtualizing on a new Dell PowerEdge 420 that is set to be delivered at the end of the month. I have used Vmware player, but never bare-metal server hypervisors.

The server comes with 2 x 300GB SAS drives and a HW Raid card and we entend on putting Windows 2012 standard and migrating our exsisting win2008r2 to a VM. I've read parts of a book I borrowed called "Mastering VMWare vSphere 5 (Scott Lowe) - however this is overboard to what we are doing and is more enterprise and not Small Business.

Is there any "simple examples or tutorials" using local hard drives out there?

Thoughts thus far:

* Mirror 300GB SAS drives and use for primary server (virtualized) dedicated drives

* RAID 5 with SATA III 500GB drives for additional storage and to hold Win2k8r2 VM and maybe a few others

I assume I need a seperate dedicated drive for ESXi to install too... or is it safe to install on the mirrored drive in a seperate partition?

Any pointers or links would be useful,

Regards,

Chris

[a_p_]

Welcome ot the Community,

I don't know if there's some simple documentation for disk usage. However, it's actually very easy. What you basically do is to keep ~20% free disk space on a datastore (e.g. for snapshots) and ensure you monitor disk usage in case you use Thin Provisioning (which I would not do in this case).

There's no need for a dedicated disk for ESXi. The installation will automatically partition the installation disk. ESXi will only consume ~5GB disk space anyway.

Some hints regarding local storage. Make sure the RAID controller is listed in VMware's HCL (http://www.vmware.com/go/hcl) and has a BBU (battery-backed write cache) attached. This makes a HUGE difference in disk performance. Also make sure you use at least 4 disks for RAID5.

How do you plan for backup? In case you plan to use a VM based backup, you may need to get a paid license for the host (essentials will do) to unlock the API.

André

[LNCCS]

André,

Thank you for the response.

I will double check the controller on the HCL for sure (PERC H710 ADPT RAID Cont, 512MB NV, FH)

I was planning on using Symantec System Recovery, but you are correct that the imaging would require a licensed version for the API (if I recall from training). Hmm, not sure I want to invest $1000.00 more at this time. If I backup the RAID 5 (with VM's) within a Guest OS to an external source - would this still require the API or does VSS take care of it.

How do most handle backups and antivirus?

Regards,

C

[a_p_]

You can certainly use agent based backup without an ESXi license requirement. The license is only required in case you need to unlock the API or your host has more than 32GB of physical memory.

For small environments like yours, I'd suggest you handle antivirus as ion physical Windows machines. Regarding backup, it depends on your needs (SLAs, time to recover, ...) how you do your backup. I don't want to sound like a salesman, but I would probably purchase an an Essentials Kit along with Veeam Essentials!? And since this is a single host environment, I'd also make sure to have the required support for the hardware (e.g. 13x5, 4h Onsite)

André