VCMS without a SAN?

[SirToby]

Hello collegues,

I'm running one ESX Server 3.0.2 in production now for two years. We plan to virtualise more of our servers, so we plan to buy two more ESX (on FSC TX 600 with direct attached storage instead of a SAN, a RAID5 of 10 disks wih 300 GB each).

I have an offer from my vendor and he included a license of Virtual Center Management Server in his offer. The price is quite high and I am wondering whether VCMS makes any sense without a SAN. Is it possible to vmotion VMs with it or what do I do with it having three ESX each with direct attached SCSI disks?

Thanks for any help, Michael

[jfields]

Michael,

Hello. As to whether it is worth it, that is open for debate. VCMS is rather expensive if you will not have VMotion, HA, and DRS. Basically, then you are just getting cloning (which you can do with other products easily) and centralized management. With three ESX hosts, you can probably get away without centralized management (depending on how many VMs you have). You will not be able to do any of the advanced features without network storage and VMware Infrastructure Enterprise for all 3 ESX hosts.

You can use NAS solutions as an cheaper alternative to a SAN, but the general consensus seems to be that NAS devices are too slow to handle the full load. If you are running production VMs on your Infrastructrure, I would not run it on a NAS. The reason is that VMware doesn't support any cheap NAS devices. The only cheap solution they support is to use really old versions of Fedora or Red Hat Enterprise with NAS features and your own server. For the list of supported devices of all types, look here: . If you can find room in your budget, low-end iSCSI SANs can be had for as little as $10K-15K.

JF

[SirToby]

Thank you, jfields, for your quick reply.

Maybe we drop VCMS and work with esXpress instead. They have a mass restore possibility and this could substitute VMotion for my setting.

Michael

[Texiwill]

Hello,

If your Direct Attach Storage has its own controller like an HP MSA500, then you can use it as a shared storage device between up to 4 ESX servers. That is the limitation in the MSA500 and I think it is the highest limit of such devices. With this, then VC would be necessary as you could employ vMotion. If you are using any form of shared storage, either NFS, iSCSI, Shared SCSI, or SAN, then vMotion will still work.

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. Available on Rough Cuts at http://safari.informit.com/9780132302074