how to start with vmware in SMB

[wibni]

Hi Everyone,

I've been reading through this forum to help me understand more about vmware. I think I still only have a very basic understanding of vmware, so would like to ask for your recommendations for the project I'm about to start.

We are a SMB company with 3 offices in 3 locations. We're about to implement a new software which runs on separate SQL Servers 2005 in all 3 offices.

I'm planning to provide all 3 offices with an identical setup and have the SQL servers replicated over night.

Servers needed are SQL server, file server and licence server.

The hardware I've been looking at is DELL PE R710 or PE2950III. The number of people using the software would be around 5-6 for each office.

Now, my goal is to eventually move all our servers into a VM, but to keep it simple for now, I'd like to just start with what's needed for my project.

My plan is to purchase 1 server for each office and have them running 2 VMs each (SQL, licence server). As for the file server I could make use of the local storage of the physical server.

I'm aware this setup won't give me any redundancy in the case of a hardware error of the physical machine, but I'm hoping to expand my setup with next year’s budget and buy the redundant servers.

So I'm trying to get it up and running now with spending not too much on hardware, but I still want to be able to move to a vmware enterprise solution that lets me move VM's from 1 physical machine to another etc.

I'm wondering now, which software package to use for my project. I've been mainly reading about ESX and ESXi. I was looking at the Foundation licence but am not sure whether ESXi makes much sense at all if I have my VMs on 1 physical machine only.

So would the VMware Server be a better solution for me? If I then decide for the VMWare Server, can I still upgrade to ESXi at a later stage?

If I go with ESXi, I understand I can have it as embedded or installed. I assume I can't use the local storage for files when using the embedded version of ESXi?

If I install ESXi however, I need to boot up into Win Server 2003 or 2008 first which requires a separate licence again and then install ESXi on its own partition on a Raid1 array. I would then use a Raid 5 for all the VMs.

Also with ESXi, would I be able to upgrade to a later release of ESXi with my setup? I'm assuming all VMs need to be shut down for an upgrade of ESXi?

Appreciate any advice.

Cheers

[pizang]

ESXi - you can use local storage in both situations (embeded and disk install). ESXi makemuch sense in your situation - it simplifies deployement.

You cannot use W2k3 and ESXi as a concurrent systems - ESXi should be a base one. It is totaly different than Vmware Server - you are setting up ESXi and than you are creating virtual machines that are using it.

I would set-up everything as follows:

- buy 3 servers with embeded ESXi

- create RAID 5 form all your disks on each server or RAID 1 (or RAID 10) for SQL and RAID 1 (or RAID5) for file server and VM images - it dependshow much performance you need and how many disks you can put into server,

- create 3 VMs on each server - SQL, License, File Server (for what reason you need license server?), instal W2K3 on each one.

You will need one, additional server in your central location for vSphere to manage local and remote ofices.

If you won't need more servers Foundation will be good for you.

install 3

[dburgess · Accepted solution]

Yes this seems a sensible approach. As you are new to this make sure you understand the different ESX options here as it can be a little confusing to start with. Going with the Vmware Server route would be much more disruptive in future as you will incur more downtime to make the shift. Just to be clear VMware Server is a where we provide an application that runs on Windows (or Linux) to provide the virtualisation functionality. ESX :smileyinfo: or otherwise is running directly on the hardware.

ESXi free edition, this may be an option for you initially but you cannot manage it with vCenter. You have to use the VI Client directly to each box, can't get the enterprise features like vmotion etc. With only one server though, initially this might be a good starting point.

With paid for ESX you will have serveral other options, note the functionality of the ESX layer is essentially identical though, we are just enabling you to add the other stuff by taking the commercial offering.

At this point it is kind of assumed you have vCenter, so you will need a Windows server to host that, can be a VM if you want. If you have started with the free edition this is simply a matter of connecting the vCenter machine to ESXi nodes and they get enabled with the management features - no downtime required.

Next you have 2 choices for ESXi

1) Installable either to hard disk or USB device

2) Buy it pre-installed with your server.

Which edition you buy is then the question. We have some SMB focussed bundles called Essentials or Essentials plus, but they are limited to a maximum of three servers in total, this would be ok for you in you're initial scenario but if you then want to make each site two nodes then you would not have anywhere to go,a nd currently there is not a licensing mechanism to upgrade, for this reason I would suggest you look seriously at 'Standard'.

[azn2kew]

Since you do not have two host in a cluster, so using ESXi is the best solution to budget wise, and you can create RAID 5 for all disks space and if you want, look at virtual SAN if you need better performance such as Lefthand's Network VSA or SANMelody or free tool like OpenFiler, FreeNAS, Starwind, StorMagic these will work small office SAN. You may install all 3 VMs on local disks but for performance wise it would be at least SAS drives recommended. In order to manage ESXi effectively, you may have to license vCenter server but wasted since only one host so I would use free scripting tools out there and lots of them pretty good written by William Lam. http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9852

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

Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

VMware vExpert 2009

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant

[wibni]

Thank you for your very helpful replies.

I got a couple more questions though and would again very much appreciate your recommendations.

How many network ports would you suggest as a minimum per server in my configuration?

I'm aware it all depends on the load of the VM but I'm also interested in how I would have to segment my network in order to make vmware reliable.

For example I've read it is best practice for the management station to be on a different subnet then the VMs.

So assuming I have 3 VMs on each server and use local storage, I would need at least 4 network ports per server (3VM + 1 Management)?

I find VMWare’s licensing model quite confusing but I currently understand it like that.

ESXi comes in several different flavours from free to Enterprise plus.

To manage ESXi, I need the vCenterServer. Can I manage ESXI without the vCenterServer also?

Dburges mentioned vCenterServer requires a Win Server OS. Can it also be run under Win XP or is Win Server web edition sufficient to run it?

The free version of ESXi doesn’t work with the vCenterServer but I can use VIClient.

Can I later upgrade from free ESXi edition to Standard edition?

Now there is also vSphere which comes in different versions again.

I’m assuming vSphere is called the whole package that INCLUDES ESXi already, plus a couple of additional functions (e.g. HA, Update Manger) depending on the license (e.g. Essential, Standard,..) I chose?

Does vSphere already include the vCenterServer as well or would I have to purchase it separately?

Looking at the costs of the VCenterServer standard version makes me think it is to be purchased separately unfortunately.

Do I need to purchase a vSphere licence for each physical processor installed in the server?

Can ESXi free license run on multiple physical processors at all?

Does it makes sense to purchase vSphere Standard which I’m assuming includes ESXi Standard but not purchasing vCenterServer?

If this doesn’t work I would have to go for ESXi free edition hoping I can upgrade to Standard at a later stage.

[pizang]

Network ports: it depends which version (with vmotion?) of vSphere you are going to use and whether you are going to have iSCSI storage. You need one-two management ports(two for redundancy), at least 2 ports for VM and 2 for iSCSI if you use it. Granted you have 2 onboard Gigabit ports you should buy one 4-port card (or 2 2-port cards for more redundancy). You do not need 1 port per 1 VM - VM hardly ever use whole bandwith.

ESXi free has seriuous limitations. First of all there is no way to backup VMs automatically. So it is "no-go" for production use. You need Windows Server for vSphere - I do not think that web edition will be ok.

If you are budget tight buy vSphere Esential Edition and than buy Veeam Backup. You will have virtualization and good backup solution.