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Khue
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Virtual Center 2.x Without SAN Storage

Hey Everyone,

We've just purchased Virtual Center 2.x for our VMware environment and I was looking for some direction on documentation (some links). I have browsed through some of the technical documentation but I can't see to find anything too specific about using VC w/o having a SAN environment. Currently I have about 6 standalone ESX servers with about 5 Guest OS's a piece for a total of 30 production Guest OSs. Eventually I will have a SAN but that won't be for some time. Has anyone had a VC deployment similar to what my environment deployment will be like? Any pointers?

All comments and tips are welcome.

Thanks!

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2 Replies
aguacero
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

My recommendation would be if you have a spare server of which you can load plenty of drives in and using OpenFiler.

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hicksj
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Khue,

Its not really a big deal. A lot of the features of VC revolve around using hosts & storage as shared pools of resources. Currently you have a few small islands, where shipping components between them is slow and costly. However, depending on your business needs, that may be just fine. The addition of a SAN will bridge all those islands an open up many opportunities.

You miss out on features such as DRS, allowing Virtual Center to balance guest load across clusters of hosts. You also miss out on HA (high availability). But you still have a central location to view / manage your virtual infrastructure. You get the benefits of directory integrated authentication, roles, templates, resource monitoring, alerts, update management (though UM is somewhat hampered since host maintenance is difficult without a SAN), etc.

After only a few hosts w/ or w/o a SAN, VC provides plenty of benefits to justify its cost.

Regards, J