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dlchapman
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vCenter/vSphere Setup Questions

I apologize if this is the wrong community to post these questions in. I thought the vSphere community to be most appropriate however there is no generic vSphere category. The vCenter Server general category was the next appropriate.

Our company is in the process of purchasing hardware for the vSphere 4. We've budgeted the cost to purchase the vSphere 4 Essentials Plus bundle ($5000) however I'm quite sure that I can convince our Exec Team to approve the purchase of the vSphere 4 Advanced Acceleration Kit ($17000) once I've shown them vMotion Live Migration and Fault Tolerance. With that being said, I am still new to vmWare products and need a little advice. Here are some questions I have.

1) My plan is to have all three physical hosts boot their ESX/ESXi installation off our iSCSI SAN to avoid having to have local storage on each server. It this an acceptable practice or is this not preferred? Is there any performance penalty once the servers are up and running? Your guidance here would be greatly appreciated.

2) I understand I can choose between ESX and ESXi during my installation. I was under the assumption that ESXi was more of a lower-end product (hence the free version) however I've read on vmware.com that ESXi is the preferred product for new installations and that ESX is only available for legacy add-on products. Is this correct? Should I go with ESXi for all three servers?

3) Where does vCenter Server get installed? Is it run off of one of my three physical servers or does it need an additional server. I have zero experience with vCenter Server so I have no idea on this one.

4) Would it be advisable to install local disks on each server for the paging/swap file?

5) I will be purchasing Veeam Backup & Replication for backup. Does it make a difference on wether I choose ESX or ESXi?

Thanks in advance for all of your advice.

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weinstein5
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You are correct - if vcenter is down FT stops - but this is only a problem is the primary virtual machine failes at the same time -

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gary1012
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I'll take a crack at this...

1. I've never done SAN boot from iSCSI but have done so with FC and it

works great. We use SAN boot to reduce heat and cooling costs and to

ease recovery in the event of a server hardware failure. Since you're

considering ESXi, you may want to opt for the embedded version supplied

by your server vendor.

2. There isn't a difference from a VM base functionality perspective

between ESX and free ESXi. Most new installs will use ESXi as a means

to justify virtualization within a SMB. You can leverage the added

functionality of the editions you mentioned with ESXi. One of the main

reasons ESXi was released was to reduce the attack surface of the

hypervisor. Additionally, I think that you will not have a choice in

the future. Standard ESX with Service Console will probably disappear

in the next major version.

3. It can be physical or virtual. Check out this link for more details.

4. Swap will be faster on local disk but if you're swapping you probably have larger issues to tackle.

5. Not a Veeam user but it probably doesn't matter...

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weinstein5
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To add to the location of the swap files - and I assume you are referring to the per vm vmkernel swap files - best practice is to keep them with VM configuration files because if any files used by the virtual machine are not on storage shared by your ESX/ESXi servers you will not be able to take advantage of vmotion, vmware HA or vmware DRS -

I would also virtualize your VC server because you will be able to take advantage of HA to recover form an ESX host failure -

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dlchapman
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Thank you both for your helpful advice. It is much appreciated.

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dlchapman
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gary1012,

Unfortunately, getting ESX embedded is out of the question since I am getting our servers second-hand from a surplus store.

Thanks for the link on the Physical vs Virtual vCenter Server installation. However, I still have some questions regarding phsycal or virtual installation of vCenter Server. The article states that vCenter Server must be available for to start a VMotion operation. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Fault Tolerance (which is included in the vSphere Advanced Acceleration Kit) requires VMotion. So I can assume that if the physical machine that has vCenter installed on it (as a virtual machine) goes down, Fault Tolerance fails?

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dlchapman
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gary1012,

Unfortunately, getting ESX embedded is out of the question since I am getting our servers second-hand from a surplus store.

Thanks for the link on the Physical vs Virtual vCenter Server installation. However, I still have some questions regarding phsycal or virtual installation of vCenter Server. The article states that vCenter Server must be available for to start a VMotion operation. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Fault Tolerance (which is included in the vSphere Advanced Acceleration Kit) requires VMotion. So I can assume that if the physical machine that has vCenter installed on it (as a virtual machine) goes down, Fault Tolerance fails?

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weinstein5
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You are correct - if vcenter is down FT stops - but this is only a problem is the primary virtual machine failes at the same time -

If you find this or any other answer useful please consider awarding points by marking the answer correct or helpful

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