VMware Cloud Community
shunter1
Contributor
Contributor

HA, DRS, VMotion work arounds ??

We want to virtualize our entire server farm to about 20 blades. We are looking at VMWare Foundation at $995 (to be released) or one of the competing products from other vendors (which it might not be right to mention names on a vmware forum). The foundation is lacking the HA, VMotion, and DRS. Unfortunately Enterprise at $5750 is too expensive. I think these are fantastic features, but how do you work around them? The competing products, as you may know, have similar functions like VMotion and HA, but nothing as complete as VMWare's solution.

1. If I want to move a VM with Foundation version, can I suspend the VM and then move it and then restart it? Or do I need to kill the session, and then move it to a new blade, and then start it? The former wouldnt be too bad, it would just be in limbo for 15-20 seconds while I do the move around i guess?

2. What happens if a blade fails, without HA, what do I do? Is it easy for me to just go into the management console where the blade is "dead", and then bring up the VM on a new blade? Or do I need to plan for this contingency by copying a bunch of VMs on many blades and just starting them up as needed?

3. We will be running about 5-6 of the blades in DR. Not sure if there is any major benefit with the enterprise version as I assume copying VMs to the DR is part of all packages.

Any ideas is appreciated

Reply
0 Kudos
5 Replies
larstr
Champion
Champion

1. While this would probably work (suspend+cold migrate without data relocation), I guess it would take more time than 15-20 seconds depending on the amount of memory it needs to flush to disk.

2. As long as the VMs live on shared storage it's not that difficult to register the ones from a dead blade into running ones. But it's still a manual task.

3. DR?

Lars

Reply
0 Kudos
vmcms
Contributor
Contributor

First, I know nothing about VMware.

I am in the same boat. The cost of Enterprise is just the start. To use VMotion you have to have a Virtual Center Server and some additional licenses which is another 5k.

VMware is great stuff but the cool toys are for the big boys. I think it is awesome that they have some starter products and are lowering the threshold so that even the smallest of enteprises can benefit from server virtualization.

We're looking at upgrading from VI Starter to Standard to get SAN support. A Dell MD3000i iSCSI SAN can be had for ~ 10k.I envision being able to "down" the first ESX server, connect to the LUN with another and import the virtual disks to create the virtual machines on the second VMware server.

Reply
0 Kudos
EGRAdmin
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

1. If I want to move a VM with Foundation version, can I suspend the VM and then move it and then restart it? Or do I need to kill the session, and then move it to a new blade, and then start it?

I'm fairly certain VMotion is the only way to move an online VM.

2. What happens if a blade fails, without HA, what do I do? Is it easy for me to just go into the management console where the blade is "dead", and then bring up the VM on a new blade? Or do I need to plan for this contingency by copying a bunch of VMs on many blades and just starting them up as needed?

I recently had this exact thing happen on one of our IBM H Series Blade servers.

We don't have HA online yet as we have an outside agency manage our DNS (gotta love it...).

When the blade went offline I had to issue the following commands inside the ESX service console;

From whatever blade server can see the LUN where your VM files are located type this;

Log into your managament site and open a remote console.

Log into an online ESX server as root.

cd /vmfs/volumes

dir

(to make sure you can see the LUN's - case sensitive.)

vmware-cmd -s register /vmfs/volumes/SHARED-VOLUME-NAME/VM-NAME/VM-NAME.vmx

SHARED-VOLUME-NAME = your shared storage name

VM-NAME = the VM you want to restore

VM-NAME.vmx = the .vmx file of the server you want to import.

so when I needed to restore the WSUS server this is what I had to type;

vmware-cmd -s register /vmfs/volumes/Shared-ESX-LUN-4/WSUS/WSUS.vmx

That immediately imported the WSUS VM back into the new blade server.

3.We will be running about 5-6 of the blades in DR.

I'm currently running a 7 blade setup.

Blades 1-5 are ESX servers, 6 is a hardware spare for emergency VM hosting and blade 14 is the VC/License/VCB server.

I find it much easier to use VI3 for DR then to use anything else. It's more stable and you can recover fast if theres any problems. I find VCB doesn't work for me 100% of the time so I'm going to possibly look at third party solutions.

Just remember with blades it can get confusing with all the IP's going around so when you setup make sure nobody is going to take your VMotion range of IP's. If they do VMotion will start randomly failing and give you a huge headache...

Reply
0 Kudos
jayolsen
Expert
Expert

Probably not the answer you are looking for but some new offerings will be available soon.

Reply
0 Kudos
Texiwill
Leadership
Leadership

Hello,

Without VirtualCenter there is currently no way to perform a Migration of a running machine, Live Migration or vMotion. All you can do is a Fast Migration, which shutsdown the VM, moves it to the new host and starts it up. HPSIM's VMM plugin does Fast Migrations for ESX servers, or it can do vMotions if a VC server is available.

If you can handle the downtime, fast migration is your best bet for non-vMotion capable configurations.

If you can not handle the downtime, consider setting up clusters of VMs across all your hosts. THere are quite a few caveats for this however.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky, author of the forthcoming 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', publishing January 2008, (c) 2008 Pearson Education

--
Edward L. Haletky
vExpert XIV: 2009-2023,
VMTN Community Moderator
vSphere Upgrade Saga: https://www.astroarch.com/blogs
GitHub Repo: https://github.com/Texiwill
Reply
0 Kudos