Design Help for Potential Customer

[mvaccarino]

Hi,


We just signed up as a vmware partner and haven't sold the product before. Have a potential customer who's looking for a VMWare solutionm they currently are going to be building a new network from scratch. Below is what I anticipate and was wondering if I could get some suggestions and hardware and software requirements I would need.



    * One server probably running up to 10 virtual machines all running Windows 2008 Server R2 OS.
    * Would want an additional server for failover for fully redudant system so need VMotion and HA I would assume
    * San solution for storage, would I need to have 2 SAN solutions to be fully redudant or would 1 work and at least have the hardware failover if a server  

      fails.

I know I probably need more information to help determine what the customer needs but I really just need to know as far as hardware and software what VMWare licenses I need, broken down for me to help understand what the solution is going to cost.

Appreciate anyones help in advance.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

For failover you'll want 2 hosts, but you can use a single SAN.  If you want redundancy in the SAN you can look at a unit like HP's Lefthand SANs which replicate data over 2 or more server nodes.  You could also look at a software SAN.  With such a solution you would run a SAN VM which could replicate to another SAN VM on the other host.  You'd just be using local storage on the hosts, but as the storage would be presented via a SAN VM you would still be able to use HA / vMotion.

The Essential Plus kit offers vMotion and HA and is bundled in a kit which includes vCenter and licensing for up to 3 hosts (limited to 2 CPUs per host).

http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/small-business/buy.html

Dave
VMware Communities User Moderator

Free ESXi Essentials training / eBook offer

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[idle-jam]

also as a new partner i would advise you going thru the partner portal for training as well as engaging local VMware SE as they could advise you further on things that they can see from the potential candidates for P2V and etc ..

[mvaccarino]

Dave,

Thanks for the response, the information is very helpful. My question about Essential Plus kit, you said it's limited to 3 hosts, so does this mean I can have up to 3 physical servers and can I have unlimited number of VMs on each host? Of course I would be limited on hardware on the number of VMs I can run but wanted to know if I had to pay extra licenses for the VMs. So if I had have 3 physical servers, I could run VMotion and HA across all 3 servers.

Thanks,

[AndreTheGiant]

You have vMotion, HA a VDR for 3 hosts. Without VM number limit.

Note that you can choose (with a valid SnS) to pay for the upgrade to Acceleration Kit Standard that remove the limit in vCenter.

Andre

[mvaccarino]

What is the limit on VCenter?

[AndreTheGiant]

Max 3 host, no Orchestrato and no linked clone... as a Foundation version.

With Acceleration Kit the vCenter Server is always a Standard version (with no limits).

Andre