Start Over

[shamshah]

Hi,

Apologies in advance as I a newbie here.

I am tasked with rebuilding our Virtual Environment. Our business is growing in providing IaaS and would I like some design ideas, recommendations, on how to plan my build.

We currently have 2 hosts - ESXi 4.1 and vCenter Cluster.

We are adding a 3rd host and take it to latest stable verison ESXi 5.1 799733 and start over.

Our Hardware is 90% Dell. Dell Hosts, Dell EQ SANs, Juniper Firewall/Switches.

I would like to utilise vCloud Director (as I believe this is the way forward) although we have not trailed this yet.

We would be using Trend Deep Security for AV, Veeam B&R for Backups.

I am looking for some advice on what my best approach would be, any gotchas out there to look out for, what other products I should consider etc.

any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

--SS

[--Norton--]

Hi SS

In my eyes its going to be difficult for you to achieve a nice vCloud environment with only 3 hosts.

Normally you would have your vCloud management VMs (VC, VCops, Trend Micro, Chargeback, Cloud Cells) etc hosted on there own cluster away from the hosts that you would be using for the Cloud resource.

If you want to factor redundancy in for these then you would need atleast 2 and 2, so 2 hosts for management cluster and 2 for vcloud resource.

Obviously depending on your requirements and usage you may get away with a 1 and 2 split.

For the purposes of trend micro and vshield you certainly want to seperate the hosts out from the resource vm cluster being managed by them as I dont think its supported to run the VC on the same host as is being managed by the Trend Micro anyway?

Hope this helps

[Gabrie1]

As -Norton- already mentioned, your environment is a bit small for a vCloud environment. Can you maybe explain a bit more on what your goal is? Deploying VMs or running a vCloud is not a goal in it self. You should look at a vCloud as a self-service portal for your customers to deploy their own VMs. With just two hosts, you'll quickly run out of resources. If you only want to virtualize some servers, I suggest you start with just vSphere.

[shamshah]

Thanks Guys for the recommendations.

Currently we just have VC environment and I wanted to see if vCloud would be a good way forward.

Going on what you both have said I will be sticking to just VC and having the 3 hosts in the cluster.

Thanks for input.