vSphere ESXi good, bad, ugly

[Mizzou_RobMan]

We are thinking of performing our upgrade from ESX 3.5 to vSphere with ESXi.

Our environment is 25-35 hosts, mostly HP and some Dell.

What should we be cautious of with ESXi (besides not having a console and any scripts, etc)? Limitations?

I think it will take a bit to get used to vCLI and vMA since we have been used to the console on the host since ESX 2.0. I had heard some issues with security related to ESXi, but I don't recall where I heard that, does anyone have any information that might be useful?

Besides the ESXi Chronicles Blog, does anyone have any good blogs, etc to recommend specifically for ESXi?

BTW- Are they going to change the name to vSpherei?

[admin]

It's not an ESXi-only tool but many ESXi users have found PowerCLI helpful for installing and configuring ESXi hosts and their VMs.

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Carter Shanklin

Read the PowerCLI Blog
[Follow me on Twitter|http://twitter.com/cshanklin]

[AntonVZhbankov]

>What should we be cautious of with ESXi (besides not having a console and any scripts, etc)? Limitations?

If you're going to run FT machines - do not mix ESX and ESXi in the same cluster.

>I think it will take a bit to get used to vCLI and vMA since we have been used to the console on the host since ESX 2.0.

I have not really big infrastructure - about 10 hosts with 100+ VMs, but I see a very little need for ESX console. And since we're going to upgrade this year mabe up to 30-40 hosts I see even less need for ESX console. It can be useful sometimes, but only for troubleshooting.

>I had heard some issues with security related to ESXi, but I don't recall where I heard that, does anyone have any information that might be useful?

ESXi is more secure than ESX.

>Besides the ESXi Chronicles Blog, does anyone have any good blogs, etc to recommend specifically for ESXi?

Any vmware related blog contains a lot of information about ESXi, it's just a part of big family. There is nothing so special in service console, ESXi can do anything ESX can.

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MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[AntonVZhbankov]

>many ESXi users have found PowerCLI helpful

Many pluses. When you have a couple of hosts and 20-30 VMs it's not hard to do all the tasks manually, in vSphere client. But when your infrastructure starts to grow PowerCLI becomes very useful.

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MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[Mizzou_RobMan]

Perhaps the security question was related to the traffic between the vCLI or vMA and the hosts..?

[AntonVZhbankov · Accepted solution]

I think SSL/SSH is secure enough.

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MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru