Free ESXi or ESX Ent?

[cosy]

HI Guys,

We are in the Last phase of finializing purchase of Servers and Now i got this news so do i start with this free ESXI servers?

Any benifits or any thoughts pls

And also going to buy Dell EMC CX4-120 or Netapps FAS2050

Thanks,

[Dave_Mishchenko]

If you were looking at using the VI Enterprise features like vmotion, etc then you would still need to license your ESXi hosts at the VI Enterprise level.

With ESXi free you can only run a standalone host. You could show a lun between ESXi host, but you wouldn't be able to manage them with VC (that would at least require an upgrade to VI Foundation licenses to get the VC Agent license.

See the below for what you get with each licensing level.

Licensed features - page 61 - http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_35/esx_3i_i/r35/vi3_35_25_3i_i_setup.pdf

[jyvesd]

Well It will depends on what you need. Of course you can begin with ESXi but if you need HA-DRS-Vmtion then you will need to upgrade and buy an Virtual center.

[cosy]

HI,

Yes we need and love all the HA and Vmotion etc etc but the issue is money

if we start with esxi, then upgrade path going to be cheap?

cosy

[Dave_Mishchenko]

See the pricing and packaging PDF for upgrade costs. You could upgrade from ESXi free to Foundation and then higher adding VC when you get Foundation or higher licensing - http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vi_pricing3.pdf. You could start with the VC Foundation bundles . VC Foundation is limited to 3 hosts, but you get same savings there and can upgrade to the full version of VC later.

For your ESXi hosts, it'll just be a matter of updating the licensing. You won't have to reinstall.

[jyvesd]

Well since ESXi is free I do not believe the upgrade cost to be cheap...Now depending on the number of host you can consider of using the accelaration kitas pricing are really attractive. There are different accelaration kit with Enterprise licence available. The Midsize and Enterprise. It's also describe here:

[azn2kew]

This article can explain a little bit on licensing part.

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!!

Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant

[cosy]

HI,

Thanks for ESXI part but not sure we should go with Dell EMC CX4-120 or Netapps FAS2050? or go with AX4-5?

If we running 2x SQL 2000 Servers do we really need the Fiber Drives?

[depping]

it's hard so say if you need it or not. all depends on the i/o of these two sql servers and the other servers as well. I've seen people run on cheap boxes without any problems but don't expect high performance. If you're trying to cut down the costs why not look into iSCSI boxes like Lefthand or Equallogic?

What will the total size of your Virtualized Datacenter be? What kind of VM's will you be running? What kind of performance do you expect? What are the other SAN features you would like to have? Are you also looking into SRM? Etc.

Duncan

My virtualisation blog:

http://www.yellow-bricks.com

If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".

[cosy]

Hi,

What will the total size of your Virtualized Datacenter be?

3.6 TB

What kind

of VM's will you be running? 12-15 Servers

Exchange ( 100 Users) , SQL, Print & File, Citrix ( 30 users) , Web SQL,

What kind of performance do you expect?

SQL is critical to the business so need best performance.

What are the other SAN features you would like to have?

Snapshot and DR ( remote site- not this stage)

Are you also

looking into SRM?

Next Stage

Can we run Physical SQL Server attached to SAN and Clustering that server with Virtual SQL ?

[cosy]

HI Guys,

First i thought of buying ESX Ent with Support but that going to cost 28K so i thought of buying 3 x servers and CX4-120 SAN.

I got 12-15 Servers. And need 3.0 TB HDD Space. I thought of run my SQL Server as a physical Server and run ESXi on 2 x new servers.

These are my questions and lplease help.

1. Can we attached Physical SQL server and 2 x ESXi to SAN?

2. Any performance hits?

3. How many LUNs i should create? (for Physical + Virtual)

4. What sort of RAID levels? (best performance for SQL)

5. Can we share the LUNs with 2x ESXi?

[DeeJay]

1) Yes you can attach physical servers and ESX hosts to the same SAN. ESX is just another OS so there are no particular performance hits. However, have you considered using iSCSI or NFS for ESX rather a conventional FC SAN?

3) That depends. Perhaps 0 ESX LUNS (if you use NFS), or maybe lots if everything is FC or iSCSI. Netapp use aggregates of disks so nomatter what you store on your filer (in terms of volumes, LUNS etc) you could use share a single aggregate to get some performance benefits.

4) Netapp use RAID4 (which is not commonly used by their customers for data volumes) or RAID DP.

5) Yes.

Also, you may want to read about other people's experience of the space savings you can achieve using deduplication (ASIS) on Netapp which may reduce your disk space requirements.

Sorry for the Netapp bias, but we've moved all our VM's onto their platform from EMC/HP.

[cosy]

HI,

Thanks,

1) Yes you can attach physical servers and ESX hosts to the same SAN.

ESX is just another OS so there are no particular performance hits.

However, have you considered using iSCSI or NFS for ESX rather a

conventional FC SAN?

Going to use FC SAN for ESXi and Physical SQL

[sdd]

Hi Cosy,

First, I will point out that I work for EMC, so I will try not to talk about anything but capabilities or best practices here.

With that said, I would state that there are some very cool capabilities in the CX4 for an environment like yours. Some of the examples of this are multi-protocol connectivity (iSCSI and FC), QoS in the array can be enabled if needed in the future for those mixed workloads to avoid one causing problems with another, support for direct attached FC if you want to (it is in the HCL), flexibility to move a LUN from one set of drives to another in a multitiered environment transparently from the host perspective, i.e. FC to SATA to solid state, or from a LUN spread across 5 drives to a LUN across 50 if desired.

Additionally, there are white papers and best practices documented for a number of tier 1 apps in a VMware environment already, including SQL, Oracle, Exchange, Sharepoint, and SAP. IF you have powerlink access, you can find them pretty quickly via a search for VMware and the app you are interested in.

Thanks,

Scott

Disclaimer: I am an EMC Employee

[cosy]

HI,

With CX4-120 Base Unit can hold 15 FC Drives so the issue is if i attached 1 Physical SQL Server with best practise ( RAID Levels) I don't think we can add more VM's?

1. 400GB x 5 Disks RAID 5 ( EMC OS 150GB) + 1.3TB Free : Can we use this space for VM's?

2. 400GB x 7 Disks RAID 5 ( SQL DATA, TEMP, BKP) :2.2TB

3. 400GB x 2 Disk RAID 1 ( SQL Logs) : 366GB

4. 400GB x 1 : H/S

So we can't put any VM's to No 2 isn't it? SQL and VM's ?

[DeeJay]

Not wanting to start the usual EMC/Netapp comparison/bun fight.

However, it's fair to say (I hope) that disk allocation is different on both platforms.

On a Netapp platform you's use RAID DP across the filer and the mix of workload would share a single aggregate (i.e collection of disks).

That would give you a lot of flexibility in terms of what went where, and you wouldn't be worrying about chunking your disks to create islands of storage. You'd also be able to enable prioritisation for each volume on the filer if necessary using FlexShare.

[sdd]

I won't dispute the allocation on a filer, and I will agree that disk allocation is different, but I do want to point out that you can absolutely leverage a LUN that spans multiple drives within the Clariion as well. MetaLUNs allow for a single LUN to span multiple RAID groups of whatever RAID level is needed, i.e. RAID 3, 5, 6, or 1/0.

Thanks,

Scott

[malaysiavm]

You should consider your configuration on SAN not to be mess up with your VM. In SAN, the configuration is more specify to the spindle and raid group. When you talk about EMC, you should look at the METALUN which will help to improve the I/O. As this case, you can have multiple raid group with specify size, and Meta it up, and you will get the total useable storage. then you can decide where to assign the LUN either to physical servers or ESX servers as per your usage.

Malaysia VMware Communities - http://www.malaysiavm.com

[cosy]

HI,

Now i got 2 choise. Both EMC , AX4-5 with 24 SAS Disks or CX4-120 with 15 FC Disks.

Need to find the way to configure the LUNs?

[sdd]

Cosy,

How you lay out those drives and whether you choose the AX4 or the CX4 depends on what you are planning to use them for. What applications are going to be put on them? Do you have performance requirements for those apps? You have the option of RAID 5, 6 or 1/0 on either Clariion. The biggest differentiators between the two will be scalability, 120 drives on the CX4-120 or 60 drives on that AX4-5 and connectivity, the CX4 can have a mixture of iSCSI and FC where the AX4-5 is either FC or iSCSI. Defining the RAID types will mostly depend on the read/write ratio. RAID 5/6 both work pretty well in heavily read intensive workloads. RAID 1/0 is great in write intensive workloads dur to no parity penalty on writes.

Thanks,

Scott

Disclaimer: I am an EMC Employee