Vmware ESX3I Production Enviorments

[ericsowa]

Hi, I am looking to build out a ESX3I enviorment for a prodcution .com web site and I am looking for other Engineer's whom have done this type of implemetion. We are curently run ESX 3.5 in one of our Porduction data centers in a 10 node cluster. I just want to know if anyone had some good/bad experence with esx3I yet.

[Formatter]

I have used it in a few different enviorments with many selections of os and op sys and have had no problems yet..Just allot of learning.

[klieu]

I am building a ESXi 3.5 U3 cluster of 5 ESXi hosts, with characteristics as below:

1. Each host having 400GB of SAN LUN.

2. Each host in this cluster seeing the other host' SAN LUN - This will help just incase one of the host' hardware failed and you have to recover the hosting VM quickly, using the DataStore you can browse and add the guest that was on the failed host.

I hope this help.

K

[rlund]

I am running ESXi on four boxes in Production, all with direct storage as of now.

Only one of the four is a supported hardware configuration, but I still have had no issiues.

Contact me if you want more info.

Roger Lund

My Blog:

[Doc_Rice]

I'm running a dev / lab environment, but I'm in the middle of finalizing configuration for 6 ESXi servers running on Dell 2850s all tied into an iSCSI Openfiler SAN as shared storage. I hope it works. Anyone think it won't with roughly VMs per host (most of them not being highly utilized)?

BTW, in my short testing it seems one admin running VIC on server A could accidentally delete VM files being used by server B. I had assumed there would be some file-lock protection in place, but apparently not?

[Formatter]

You can use the user groups and user priveliges to only allow them to look and not touch if required..

[Doc_Rice]

I think that would assume that each host server is managed by a different admin. In my case, any admin can manage any host, so unfortunately it's not like I can restrict a VM down by restricting access only to a particular set of admins. In the real-world case scenario, I'm the only admin right now and if I slip up, well ... some user's not going to be happy.

[klieu · Accepted solution]

Well,

This is where the "free" catch is. For individual usage, the "free" ESXI is great, but cumbersome where you have to move around 4-5 or more VI client to manage guest in each ESXi host.

In my configuration mentioned above, we are mandated to get these ESXi hosts to be centralized manage. We have to purchase VI Foundation license for each host ($1000.00 + $550 SnS), luckily we already have VC running. With this configuration and around $1500.00 we are able to manage them with Virtual Center and using AD authentication at that level to manage all guest.

K