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hongman
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A few questions about VMWare ESX and associated components

Hi

New to VMWare in general but my company has started to get involved with Virtualisation becuase we can see how big it is getting!

So anyway, in the office we have a "lab" kit of 2 HP DL360 servers, running on ESX. Off the back of that we have the VC, and I am using the Virtual Infrastructure Client on my Vista PC.

Not really sure how the VC fits in but I thought Id best mention it.

Anyways, a few questions:

1. When installing XP Pro SP2 I had to change my SCSI Controller to BusLogic to work - is this correct, and what implications does this have vs the default LSILogic?

2. Can I somehow map USB to work with my Virtual XP Machine? I looked in device manager, and couldnt see any USB components but figured that this has to be covered else where....

3. Any tips etc?

Thanks

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1/ No impact really, you just need to use the one that is compatible with your guest OS, so you're fine to use the BusLogic SCSI controller.

2/ No USB support in ESX, you'll need to use a USB over IP solution if you want USB support in the guest, there are plenty of hardware and software solutions on the web.

3/ Not sure what kind of tips you're looking for? One tip, how does VC fit in? It's the management server, and is responsible for things like vMotion, DRS, configuring HA, performance logging and templates. It also allows you to assign roles and permissions to AD accounts and access the console of any Vm in your managed farm via the VI client or WebAccess without needing to point at the ESX host running the VM.

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1/ No impact really, you just need to use the one that is compatible with your guest OS, so you're fine to use the BusLogic SCSI controller.

2/ No USB support in ESX, you'll need to use a USB over IP solution if you want USB support in the guest, there are plenty of hardware and software solutions on the web.

3/ Not sure what kind of tips you're looking for? One tip, how does VC fit in? It's the management server, and is responsible for things like vMotion, DRS, configuring HA, performance logging and templates. It also allows you to assign roles and permissions to AD accounts and access the console of any Vm in your managed farm via the VI client or WebAccess without needing to point at the ESX host running the VM.

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hongman
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Thank you for the prompt answer.

I'm not sure what tips I need, guess I just need to play with it some more and then ask as I go along.

....

In fact, I do have another question. I have a particular server that is compatible with ESX, and would like to move that server into the VM farm (p2v?) and then add the physcial server to the farm as well for additional resource.

What kind of procedure am I looking at the accomplish this?

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Is it a Windows server? If so Vmware have a free P2V tool called the VMware Converter that makes the process very easy.

http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/

Once you've got the virtual version of the server running, you can re-format and install ESX on the hardware, then add it to virtual center and away you go.

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hongman
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A few more I have thought of -

1. How big are system snapshots?

2. Where are snapshots and/or VM images held? Where is this configurable?

3. What is a resource pool?

I ask these becuase I have already tried creating a VM machine, but with limited hard drive space I was getting errors. So I would like to create a VM and soecify I want the image on XXX network location.

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hongman
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Funny you say that I am just playing with VM Converter now!

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1/ Do you mean a VM snapshot? If so, they grow bigger the longer they are in place at a rate defined by how much disk activity the VM is producing. The maximum size of a snapshot is equal to the base VMDK size.

2/ On a VMFS volume, in a directory the same as the VM's name by default. VMFS volumes can reside on any SCSI []binterfaced[/b] storage. i.e. local SCSI disks, an iSCSI target, an NFS volume, or a SAN. You choose which volume to store a VM on when you create it, but it must be on a VMFS volume.

3/ A resource pool is exactly what it sounds like, a pool of resources, this can either be all of the resources of a host, or you can create sub-pools so that certain VMs recieve more resources than others.

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hongman
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Thanks Mittell

1. Yes I meant a VM Snapshot, the once you can take and revert back to quickly.

2. Ok, that makes sense. So If I want to specify storage array to store some images, do I have to then partition a bit off so I can format it to VMFS?

3. Fine

Tieing back to point 2, right now in the VM Farm I have 2 physcial servers. The server I have my XP VM on is saying it has only 14GB free - so I want to either:

\- Add another Datastore in there (Storage Array)

\- And/Or move my XP VM to the Storage Array

- Can I do this with VMotion (no downtime) and I presume this is done on the VC?

Thanks for the advice Mittell

Hong

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