Pre-sales questions on ESX

[hgoldman]

We're looking to invest into ESX in near future. Since the price gap between the foundation version and the larger versions is quite big we're most likely going for the smallest version initially.

Currently our servers are running VMware Server with local and FC-SAN storage.

Since I read that ESX is picky about local storage I was considering moving the local disks into another box that would run a iscsi based server such as OpenFiler. Does this make sense? We're not planning of the advanced features like Vmotion then likely several of the benefits of a SAN are not present anyway.

One thing though is that I am unsure how to migrate a VM from one machine to another. Seeing training videos I see that Virtual Center has a migrate button used for vmotion. However with the foundation version is this disabled? How would I manually move a VM (in powered off state obviously) from one host to another when it's located on a SAN?

Also can consolidated backup make backups of local datastores? This would allow us to reuse the existing disks while still being able to make a single backup as we do today using some custom scripts.

I should mention that we plan to boot all the servers from a ESXi usb stick. Thus we're not depending on the local disks anyway.

Thanks.

[RParker]

ESX is not picky about local storage. The problem is the machine should be on the hardware compatibility list. And not use IDE for local disks. Also why are you booting from usb? ESX 3i is like 32 meg install. I don't think you are going to miss this from local disk storage, plus ESX isn't using any local disk resource once its running.

The clone function should work in the foundation version of VC, which is how you migrate from one machine to the next. Use network cards for this between machines. I would use NFS rather thatn iSCSI for storage. iSCSI gives you no benefit over NFS since you aren't on a SAN.

[khughes]

Other than price it sounds like you have all the fixings to utilize vmotion and other features, HA especially if you already have a FC san and FC network. But if money is an issue I would just say look for the features in the future. If you have shared storage between the two boxes, I would think you would only have to shut it down, un-register that vm with that host, then re-register it with the other host you want to power it on with.

And I agree with Rparker on this, why would you want to boot from a USB drive? If you're storing stuff locally and your local disks die, you're going to loose everything anyways, or if you boot from USB and your local disks die you're box is most likely going to die as well, I just dont' see the benifit or the hastle to configure it to boot from usb...

• Kyle

[hgoldman]

The idea about using usb sticks is to make completely diskless servers in future. It's always a hassle to make backups of systems and since our company is spread over several locations then physical access to the DC is not always a possibility. Thats why it's easier to say to a less technical person. "Go pull out the usb thingy from the port and put it into another machine and press the power button". Essentially I want to make the most failsafe environment with the limited resources we have. Harddisks is always a reason for troubles.

Furthermore most of our machines use IDE disks today which as you pointed out is likely not going to work. I at-least don't expect that the built-in raid controllers are going to be detected. Our motherboards are Asus K8N-DL and Intel S5000VSA (SATA).

Thanks.

[hgoldman]

Another related question that came to my mind is how do you perform a "poor-mans-version" of a storage-vmotion? E.g. We have 2 disk arrays and in the event that we would want to upgrade one of them all the vm's should be moved to the other. I know that we must power-off the VM's but this is acceptable. I believe that you can only mount the vmfs from linux, right? So what other options are there to view and move things around on the vmfs volumes?

Thanks.

[khughes]

You would use a program like winscp or fastscp and copy the files off the store, then upload them to the other storage lun. i think those programs work with esxi.

• Kyle