I'm Confused: What products do I need for a new DataCenter VPS hosting environment?

[TahoeTech]

I am very excited to begin using the ESX or ESXi platform for a new DataCenter I am putting together. The new DC will be a VPS Hosting solution. We plan to "lease" several VM for all sorts of clients needs, whether webhosting, offsite storage etc...

I have become VERY CONFUSED while browsing the VMWare site trying to figure out what exactly I need; both products and licenses? Hoping that someone can help break it down very easy for me here!

After browsing the site for a while I don't know if I want ESX or ESXi ? I don't know if these products come with all the bells/whistles that I have seen from some of the Demo videos here on the products pages?

I REALLY LIKE THIS SETUP HERE: http://download3.vmware.com/demos/infrastructure/vi3demo_280x250.html

That looks like exactly what I want. I like the Dynamic Resource feature, the Backup features, the FAILOVER FEATURES! All things that I will require.

So with that said, what products do I need to get started? Does everything come bundled if I go with the VMWare infrastructure product? Or do I need to get everything individually - i.e. ESXi, Vcenter, DRM, HA, etc...

[kjb007]

To get the DRS/HA/VCB features, you'll need an enterprise license for VI. Wheether you use ESX or ESXi, those services are still available. The difference between the two is that ESX comes with a "service console" while ESXi is a much smaller footprint.

-KjB

[Dave_Mishchenko]

As stated, you'll need to figure out which features you want. If you need HA, but not vmotion, then you can go with VI Standard licenses for the host. With VI Foundation / Standard / Enterprise you can install either ESXi or ESX. You would also need to purchase a vCenter (VirtualCenter) server license. Here's a good document to look at for licensing - http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vi_pricing3.pdf. Since you are considering renting out your VMs, you'll need to looking at the hosting program - http://www.vmware.com/solutions/hosting/.

[Rodos]

Others have pointed you in the right direction for some licensing. If you are wanting to create a shared environment to give out to different people you may want to get hold of a Virtualisation Consultant for a few hours just to brain storm all the stuff you are going to need to understand and work through. Even if its just to put you on the right track. Or you could suck the info out of a friendly VMware partner as part of presales.

You are going to want to think about how your backups are going to work, lots of networking issues, how big is your scale, QoS for network and storage, resource pools, security, OS licensing.

Don't get me wrong, you could build a simple system, create some VMs which connect to the internet, create VMs manually and give everyone a static IP with no firewalling and it will work. Start small and build up. Without knowing your scope or size its hard to know where your problems might be.

None of these things are hard if you have done them before but you may find a bit of experience may take you a long way quickly. Or just keep asking questions here, we are all friendly and keen to help.

Rodos

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