Growing Environments

[AndrewSt]

Up to now, I have set up a number of environments for customers, and set up my companies internal VM hosting. However, this has been done in pieces ( 10 here, 3 there, etc.)

Lets talk larger scale. How about people managing 100+ servers, in a single place? I know there are a few out there.

What did you do for Virtual Center?

1. Have you clustered it?

2. What are you using for the DB?

3. How big is your VI DB? Your Update DB?

What are the preferences for Storage?

1. SAN vs. NAS?

2. Storage vendor? 3Par/Netapp/other?

Has anyone gone geographic in their VM management?

• What I mean by this, is we are looking at designing "pods" ESX containing network/servers/storage that can go anywhere.

Anyone? Anyone? Beuhler?

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-Andrew Stueve

[jjpatel]

In our environment ,

for VC

1. yes we have clustered it with two nodes, 1 physical box and 1 VM on ESX...

2. MS SQL for DB ... ( i have no details on DB as other people take cares of it )

for storage:

we use EMC's SAN product ....

And yes from our VC we are managing ESX clusters in three different contries ... ( one in Asia and two in Europe)

I hope this helps ..

[kjb007]

This would be better-served posted in the VI forum http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/vi

But, since you asked:

I have a couple hundred vm's in my current environment, and have never needed to cluster it. My db is running on SQL Server 2005, and is currently at around 8 GB. Update DB is currently less than 100 MB.

I prefer FC SAN, but there is lots of success with iSCSI san.

I've used EMC, Hitachi, and Netapp. Netapp's virtualized storage is much more flexible than EMC/Hitachi's more rigid implementations, and there should be some nice new plugins for VI in the NetApp arrays for backup/recovery integration.

I had environments in different states previously, but they were fairly close in distance. Less than 50 Miles, but as long as you have the bandwidth, and low latency, then goegraphic management is very doable. Just no vmotion, unless you've got an OC24 or better.

Good luck,

-KjB