williambishop's Posts

I see where you're coming from, and what you're trying to do...I get it. If you have to go down that road, I might suggest having BOTH in use, the dns entry and a local entry. You're trying to make it as robust as possible, which is great, but you are sacrificing flexibility and losing out on some degree of recoverability. You need to balance the security/robustness/flexibility in everything.

Don't know if this got resolved, but I ran into the same problem. The fix was to make sure vmware platform is chosen, and sometimes one of the ports will not take all of the check boxes, which need to be as follows: You get there through host groups, edit the host group, then change options, about halfway down is a set of checkboxes, ensure these are checked on all ports the volumes are presented on. Discovery Chap Mode Unique extended copy mode unique write same mode unique comare write mode standard vaai command mode dp depletion detail reply mode

While the 6 webclient is infintely better than the previous version...Guess which version I won't be going to until they have fully baked a client or patched VIC to run with 6? Yeah...that one. I can't go in missing stuff I need to work. I shouldn't have to use RVtools to get what I used to get.

Hitachi, IBM, and EMC. I would never do a "free" storage for production environment in a critical arena. In a non-critical arena? Yeah, possibly, provided I had decent BC-DR strategies in place.

That's a toughie. It's not a lot of money. My professional answer would be as follows: Buy newer stronger servers, put a 10 gig switch in place, buy a low end storage array (storwize or vnx) and do shared storage(you can do this part even on free esxi). My, "Get it done at minimal cost" hat, says you can go one of two ways: Either move away from VMware, or Get used gear, servers and switches at around 1k apiece or lower. Get enough that you don't need support on it. Buy MULTIPLE essentials packs, point each set of 3 servers to the same storage array. Most environments, the physical hardware isn't the biggest expense anyway...it's almost always software. Between Microsoft and VMware licensing, I pay 2x more than the hardware it sits on anyway. The way you are doing it isn't exactly horrible. It's not optimal, but it's not horrible. You need to test, test, and retest your backup and restore (a backup is worthless if you can't restore it). If you focus on a HA design, where you understand the risks associated with a server dying and losing the vm's...but have set up a VERY good backup routine (even replication is possible, where you can have as little as a few minutes of loss), then you can get by. A lot of it depends on how much the budget truly is, and where you put your money. The 3 host vmware essentials is enough if you get really BEEFY hosts, Ton's of ram, and a small storage appliance. But if you need more than that kind of scale...

Mission critical...I would be hesitant. Ver. 6 (really ver. 2) is substantially better than v 1, no doubt..but I personally would want something with a bit more miles under it's belt than VSAN for mission or business critical. I'm looking at it for a DR site, and then it will house my tier 2 apps, but for my "have to be up 24/7/365" applications? Not yet. There are other hyperconverged systems out there with more age and experience on them, it's not vsan vs. traditional arrays only.