going live with esxi 5 ... few issues ...

[cylent77]

first and foremost.
which is it? esxi 5 or vsphere 5? and why the two names?

ok so so far i have gone and built the following box in hopes it'd be sufficient for my needs:

Asus P67 based board
Core i7-2600k
16GB Ram

so far i have plugged in two 1TB sata drivers. i'll always add more. i was hoping to do RAID0 but unfortunately I am unable to acquire a raid controller due to my location. so just plain SATA for the moment.

a few issues are still confusing me with esxi and are keeping me going in circles.

1) when i make a new virtual machine and i allocate 40GB to start with I can easily edit the virtual machine and simple increase the VM hardware size? my reason for asking is at one time the "Up+down" for increasing and decreasing the allotted number was disabled yet on my other VM i was able to do it. i deleted the test VM and was able to do it just fine. i can only assume its a bug.

2) the networking has got to be the most confusing in terms of the way VMware decided to implement it. Yes i have virtual adaptors. I can add so many and even add switches but theres no naming reference that makes sense. for example currently in this box i have 3 Nics. One built in and 2 external. Now -- if you log into the console you can choose the management interface... can they all be management and yet still usable in the VMs as regular nics?
what really gets to me is there is no naming convention change. if i add a new switch to the VM and add 3 nics to it how do i know which virtual nic is going to which real nic in the host?

3) do i need to worry about the resource pools at this point or can i just start making my VMs and just allocate them as they need?

4) in reference to downtime on the VMs. i want to setup two instances of Server2008R2. one as a DC and one as a Firewall. obviously i want those online 24/7. What change to the VM requires a real VM reboot? cant changes be made on the fly in realtime?

any help is greatly appreciated.

[Linjo]

So vSphere5 is the name of the whole produkt and ESXi5 is a component of it.

You could compare it to MS Office 2010 is the product and MS Word 2010 is  a component of it...

1. Probably beacuse the VM was running.

2. Well, you don't really. The whole idea is that you can setup redundancy etc. a vSwith is just that, a switch...

3. Probably not at this point unless you want to allocate resources specifically.

4. Not sure what you mean... 24/7 with only one host is not a good idea.

There are many good books on these subjects that I would recommend to read.

// Linjo

[arturka]

Hi

cylent77 wrote:

first and foremost.
which is it? esxi 5 or vsphere 5? and why the two names?

vSphere 5 is a product line name, ESXi5 is a hypervisor name

1) when i make a new virtual machine and i allocate 40GB to start with I can easily edit the virtual machine and simple increase the VM hardware size? my reason for asking is at one time the "Up+down" for increasing and decreasing the allotted number was disabled yet on my other VM i was able to do it. i deleted the test VM and was able to do it just fine. i can only assume its a bug.

yes, you can easly add space to storage, reducing it's not so easy

2) the networking has got to be the most confusing in terms of the way VMware decided to implement it. Yes i have virtual adaptors. I can add so many and even add switches but theres no naming reference that makes sense. for example currently in this box i have 3 Nics. One built in and 2 external. Now -- if you log into the console you can choose the management interface... can they all be management and yet still usable in the VMs as regular nics?

yes, you can share NIC's between mgmt of ESX and VMs

. if i add a new switch to the VM and add 3 nics to it how do i know which virtual nic is going to which real nic in the host?

what is VM ? is a virtual machine or Vmware host ? if ti's a virtual machine you cannot add vSwitch to virtual machine if it's a VMware box you cannot share pNIC (physical nics) across different vSwitches. you can share single vSwitch (with all NICs assigned to it) between PortGroups created in that vSwitch. Check vmnic MAC and you will know the physical NIC - usually naming convention is vmnic0 is onboard and vmnic1 etc are pNIC from PCI slots

3) do i need to worry about the resource pools at this point or can i just start making my VMs and just allocate them as they need?

in a test you do not need to worry about resource pools

4) in reference to downtime on the VMs. i want to setup two instances of Server2008R2. one as a DC and one as a Firewall. obviously i want those online 24/7. What change to the VM requires a real VM reboot? cant changes be made on the fly in realtime?

this is depends which version of Win2k8 you will have it  but in general to each VM you can hot-add vNIC, add or extend a data disk drive, add USB controller for some of them you can hot-add vCPU and RAM. Other operation need VM to be down.

Cheers
Artur

Please, don't forget the awarding points for "helpful" and/or "correct" answers.

[cylent77]

i am getting a bit frustrated throwing hardware at this esxi box and all the while i am not undestanding the basic function;

question repeat again (still no answer that makes sense to me:

if i add a new switch to the VM and add 3 nics to it how do i know which virtual nic is going to which real nic in the host?

the reason for this question is:

i want to setup (to start with) two Windows 2008R2 servers. One is a Domain Controller with AD Services and the second one being a Firewall TMG box.

The setup should be something like this:

DomainController --> Switch then exit to users.

TMG LAN Port--> Switch

TMG WAN Port --> External for net

confusing somewhat...

[arturka]

Hi

First: you are missing basic knowledge in terminology, naming convention and VMware technology

Second - answer my question and after demand answer for yours (BTW, I have answer your question already)

If you would put all vmnic to one vSwitch and assign all VMs to single port group you will don't know where traffic goes

solution is:

DomainController --> vmnic0/vmnic1 - vSwitch0 - PG-LAN - Switch then exit to users.

TMG LAN Port--> vmnic0/vmnic1 - vSwitch0 - PG-LAN

TMG WAN Port -->- vmnic2 - vSwitch1 - PG_TMGWAN

basically DC will be connected to PG-LAN (one vNIC)

firewall VM will be connected to PG-LAN and PG_TMGWAN (2 vNICs)

Artur

[cylent77]

Artur wrote:

Hi

First: you are missing basic knowledge in terminology, naming convention and VMware technology

Second - answer my question and after demand answer for yours (BTW, I have answer your question already)

If you would put all vmnic to one vSwitch and assign all VMs to single port group you will don't know where traffic goes

solution is:

DomainController --> vmnic0/vmnic1 - vSwitch0 - PG-LAN - Switch then exit to users.

TMG LAN Port--> vmnic0/vmnic1 - vSwitch0 - PG-LAN

TMG WAN Port -->- vmnic2 - vSwitch1 - PG_TMGWAN

basically DC will be connected to PG-LAN (one vNIC)

firewall VM will be connected to PG-LAN and PG_TMGWAN (2 vNICs)

Artur

actually i didnt ignore your reply and i am sorry if you got that impression. in one day i had to reinstall esxi 10 times. then i discovered my bios was denying the PCIe NICs from showing up in esxi5.

VM = Virtual Machine.

and by the way thanks for the help above.. what do you mean by PG?

unfrotunately i dont undertand exactly why on domaincontroller you put vmnic0/1. Dc will only have ONE lan card.

i have done the following which i know is probably wrong cause i cant get the two to ping each other.

i've given the DC 1.1.1.1 and the TMG 1.1.1.2.

if you look at the attached picture this is basically just the lan for the DC and the lan for the TMG on one vswitch.

technically they should ping each other... but they dont.