New to ESX, Keeping it simple

[mwoodbury]

I am a current user of vmware server and love the ease of converting vm's and copying the vw disk files for back ups and testing on other vmware servers. We are a manufacturer with only 4 main windows servers (one running vmware server) and 3 XP Pro application servers and we do not need 24X7 uptime, so backups can occur offline.

I want to move a SBS 2003 server to ESX instead of to a vmware server for performance reasons but want to keep things simple and still have some of the great features of the free vmware server. I have a new HP ML350 with 4 Gig of RAM and 150 GB raid 5 SAS internal storage. Installed ESX3 and it was quite easy.

My questions are:

1) What products do I need to do BASIC virutalization. There are a ton of products that are overkill (and expensive) for a smaller shop. I prefer not to use the vitual center at this time, since we would start with 1 or 2 ESX servers. I just want to be able to run VM's, back them up for testing and disaster recovery.

2) What is the best way to backup VM's and then be able to run on EITHER another ESX server OR the free vmware server for testing and backups and then move back to ESX. I can bring the server down for these backups. I tried the VMware convertor and it seems to work, but says I need a virtual center license to convert a machine to ESX (which they say you get free with virtual center - but what if I don't have the virtual center?). I also tried converting a vmware server v1 disk file to ESX and it worked great, but I brought it up and I will not log into the domain (SID problem?). Moving back and forth to other vmware server computers is so easy (just bringing the machine down and copying the files), I am hoping to not loose that.

Thanks for any input!

Mark

[Kevin_Gao]

Hi Mark,

I think the Foundation Acceleration Kit is a good option for you:

http://store.vmware.com/servlet/ControllerServlet?Action=DisplayPage&Env=BASE&Locale=en_US&SiteID=vm...

It comes with licenses for up to 6 processors (enough for 3 servers) and Virtual Center license as well.

[Troy_Clavell]

here's a good thread to look at

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/143830?tstart=0

[mwoodbury]

There is some great information at that post. It helps me to see the difference between the bare bones ESXi and ESX 3.5

What I am trying to do is be able to backup my ESX VM and restore it anywhere in an emergency.

If I only have one ESX box and my second box is running VMware server,

I would like to test my disaster recovery during off hours by copying the VM's from ESX to VMware server. Bring down the ESX vm's, Bring up the VMware Server VM's. And all should be working exactly as before. Then with normal backups inside the VM's I could backup the data.

Could I do this with:

1) ESXi and VMware convertor or

2) ESX 3.5 and VMware convertor or

3) ESX 3.5 (Vi Foundation), Consolidated Backup

4) ESX and ??? to backup the images continually making my life much easier?

Seem's like to run VMware convertor to backup a physical machine to ESX I need a license for Virtual Center! Is this true or whould that be included in VI Foundation?

Thanks for the reply's!

[azn2kew]

Well, really depends are you going to use ESX features like HA, DRS and VMotion? If so, than Foundation kit is right for you like mentioned works with 3 ESX hosts and a VC with those features in placed to secure you from high availability and redundancy as well. If you just want something to stands up your servers than you could use VMware Server & Workstation version which does just fine. If you have the budget than go with 2-3 ESX servers and have small SAN systems or cheap iSCSI solution for shared LUNs that would work just fine.

Backup has several solutions you can use, VISBU, Veeam Backup, vRanger, esXpress, VCB and free script out there as well, make sure you have source/destination storage to get the backup running other than that its very straight forward to setup. You can find tons of info on www.vmware-land.com for ESX resources.

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

[mwoodbury]

I will not be using HA or Vmotion or even Virtual center. I don't want to be adding extra servers if possible.

My whole goal is to be able to migrate my SBS 2003 server off of it's old hardware. It crashed several years back and was not fun to restore. I have recently did a test and converted it to run on vmware server and the performance was not very good, that is why I am thinking ESX instead. We do not have a SAN or iSCSI. It would just run on the internal 150GB SAS drives. I just want to be able to:

1) Periodically copy ESX VM's, to the vmware server computer for testing disaster recovery.

2) Be able to copy vmware server vm's back to ESX if necessary.

Sounds so simple! And is simple with Vmware Server!

[azn2kew]

In that case, neither way should be fine, but if you have a beefy servers out there, than using ESX 3.x is better in terms of performance, networking and storage solutions. You can also provision your VMs much better than VMware free server. You don't have to have a virtual center in your scenario and with ESX 3.x you don't have to reboot the hosts so your VMs is pretty reliable comparing to VMware server/workstation would periodically requires reboots since its running on top of Windows XP workstation. Can you look at other virtualization solution such as Xen Server, Virtual Iron, Oracle VM, MS Virtual 2005 Server or other Sun & Novell products as well. Simply stick with VMware Workstation 6.0 for it.

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

[mwoodbury]

Stefan, thanks for the reply's

I think ESX performance IS what I need, but my whole point of this post was to try and find out how a smaller company can use ESX at a basic level to get started, without having to use all of the other features (NO VC,HA,CB,UM), unless I need them to backup a VM. I don't want to add MORE comptuers to administer this (At this time)

The only thing I really want to do is....

Run on ESX and then easily back up each VM and be able to restore them to either another ESX machine OR a vmware server machine. I would back up the app data with my regular backup exec software inside the VM. The VM backups can occur offline.

Thanks!

Mark

[khughes]

There are some free 3rd party softwares out there that do bulk vm backups. might want to look into them, I know esXpress has a free version.

- Kyle

[mwoodbury]

What about the VMWARE convertor? Seems like it can be used to copy from:

1) ESX to ESX

2) ESX to VMWARE Server

3) VMWARE Server to ESX

That would be a simple solution! Although my first attempt at this from VMWARE Server to ESX with the convertor, ran fine, but when I brought the VM up in ESX I could not log into the domain, as if there was a SID problem or something. Also, convertor is not sold seperately, so I am not sure how to license it. The free version will not convert from PHYSICAL to ESX.

Seems so simple....

Mark

[adolopo]

In my past employ with a small company (and subsequently smaller budget) it's always come down to 1 of, or a combination of 3 pieces of SW:

Converter, vmkfstools and Ranger.

But I myself lean towards "vmkfstools" (CLI).