(beginner) ESXi Service Console ...free version ?

[dk3932]

Hi ,

Thanks for taking the time to read this....

Is there a free equivalent to the Red Hat 'Service Console' ....maybe like a Fedora/CentOS version?

And,

If you guys have any advice -and/or- recommendations that isn't already in the documentation for Raid 5 config (ESXi hosting multiple operating systems), I would really appreciate it.

(I've been using VMware Server & prepairing to switch to ESXi)

Thanks!

[azn2kew]

You can use RCLI or vMA appliances (aka VIMA) to administer your ESXi hosts. The RAID level is depends on some criteria. Is it a shared storage or local disk? How many disks available for RAID configuration? Most likely, RAID 5 would do most of the jobs you're looking for and if you have high I/O intensive databases such as Exchange, Oracle, SQL then using higher RAID 10 or 50 would maximize your performance but you lost a lot of disk space overhead with RAID 10 or 50. If you're using local disk, just make RAID 5 for redundancy that should be good enough. Sounds like this is a lab environment, so I suggest you look at Openfiler, FreeNAS, Starwind, or StorMagic, Xtravirt VSA which all free shared storage appliances. You can read this http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid5_gci1151829_mem1,00.html

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Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

VMware vExpert 2009

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant

[lamw · Accepted solution]

You can use RCLI or vMA appliances (aka VIMA) to administer your ESXi hosts.

Not really .... at least with the free version of ESXi, you'll only have read-only access which doesn't give you much. Take a look at this article: http://vmetc.com/2009/03/31/esxi-u4-ends-free-version-read-and-write-access-from-the-rcli/ and yes it extends to anything newer than ESXi 3.5u2/u3

If you were to license ESXi with at least the Foundation license, then yes, you can use vCLI, vMA, PowerCLI to manage your ESXi hosts but if you're using the free version you won't have any CLI access to manage. You still can use the vSphere Client GUI.

=========================================================================

William Lam

VMware vExpert 2009

VMware ESX/ESXi scripts and resources at:

VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators

If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".

[dk3932]

Thanks very much guys, I really appreciate you taking the time to reply

I'm an I.T. Student and just want to learn whatever I can with this

system...so, I just need CentOS & Windows Server/Clients

(6x 500GB SATA Hot Plug Hard Drive & RAID 5 for 6/i Controller)

So ...I will be able to use vSphere Client GUI & Use FreeNAS as shared storage.

And I'm guessing the partitioning will just be the default for ESX & each VM will have it's own .vmdk / virtual disk

Thanks again,

Don

[puzzledtux]

Yes, you would be able to manage your ESXi with the VI client (vSphere client) without any problems. However with this unlicensed version you would not have Enterprise capabilities like HA, DRS, Vmotion etc..

[DSTAVERT]

ESX :smileyinfo: can only use a maximum of 2 TB (minus 512 bytes) per LUN. You will need to break up your array into smaller chunks.