Use one or two?

[SteveDavidson]

I am in the midst of deciding whether to purchase one or two m3550 m2 machines for virtualizing our development and test activities. I will be running the following virtual environments on esxi 4

10 virtual developer environments including:

a virtual 64 bit database server - suse linux

a virtual 32 bit application server - windows server 2003

a 32 or 64 bit client for Eclipse IDE

and probably nearly the same number of test environments.

SO a total of about 60 virtual machines. I am trying to decide whether I should get one fully loaded m3550 m2 machine or two fairly loaded machines, with the idea that separating the development function from the test function would be desireable. Also, having two fairly loaded machines would allow me to scale up some in the event of future unidentified needs. In addition, I am thinking that I could back up virtual machines from one machine to the other and vice versa. What are some of your thoughts on the benefits of running two versus one.

[Troy_Clavell]

I say 2 to spread the load. I would also say you should look at vCenter which would offer HA/DRS. Because if the 60 go good, it's only a matter of time before more is wanted.

Plus, 60:1 is a big ratio and you could possibly start to see some performance degradation.

[Lightbulb]

Nothing is worse than dealing with a bunch of angry devlopers and DBAs. I concur go with two system and if you can get some shared storage (You don't have to sink a lot of money here a roll you own migh do ) for the VMs to live on you can get a functional HA/DRS cluster.

Of course we can't always get what we want but even though DEV environments often get the short end of the stick you want to make sure you at least have a recovery path for the VMs cause that daat has long term value.

[AntonVZhbankov]

2 without any doubts for load balancing and failover.

Take in consideration purschisang 2 virtualization hosts without any disks and one additional storage server for shared storage.

---

MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[SteveDavidson]

With respect to a recovery path, I was thinking I would backup vms from one system to the other, and vice-versa. Using either Vmware Data REcovery or a third party package. Another reason for having two rather than one machine.

[SteveDavidson]

Thanks to all for your responses. I am just starting out so will go

with two and local storage. I will be using the vSphere 4 essentials

with the intention of backing up vms from one machine to the other and

vice versa. In the event of disaster on one machine, I will be set to

run all the vms on the other machine.

Steve

On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 10:06 AM, Troy Clavell