Moving to VSphere from Hyper-V

[davida1992]

Hi all, I am pretty new to VMWare so I hope I am posting in the correct place.

In my previous job we had a few clients running VSphere, but I never really got much of an opportunity to play with it because for the most part it just worked without issues.

I have recently moved jobs and I now work for an organisation with approx 10K users. They use VSphere for their infrastructure so I feel it would be beneficial for me to start getting to know it a little more, and maybe looking into the certifications from VMWare,

On my home network I currently use Hyper-V but after some frustration today I thought that I should possibly try VMWare and go with VSphere. I do not have the best setup, I have 5 x 2TB disks for data backing up to a Synology. There is no hardware RAID or any sort of redundancy other than my Synology.

I do Storage Pools in HyperV though to make all of my drives appear as one larger driver just over 7TB with parity. - Does the free version of VMWare, or any version offer a similar setup to this?

I just want something reliable, that works, and that doesn't run like crap, which HyperV is doing at the moment, every VM I create runs slow, and I just cannot be bothered troubleshooting it when VMWare may be a better option for me.

Just to clarify also...

I assume VMWare is the company, VSphere is just a product. And the VSphere Client allows you to manage the product? I have used the client before and have had a basic play around with it all, but I really feel I should get more involved, what better way than to set this up on my home environment.

Thanks!

[wila]

Hi David,

Welcome at the VMware communities forum.

The location for your post is fine.

The free version of vSphere does not have something comparable to Storage Pools and as you would have to wipe everything from your system to install vSphere it is probably not a great way to do it that way.

The vSphere client that you referred to is the legacy client and it is probably better to start with the html5 web client if you are starting to learn.

Now not everything is lost. If you install VMware Workstation (or even VMware Player) then you can run vSphere within it and run it as a lab (so running vSphere as a virtual machine). You can even run guests within vSphere, although of course with a bit of a performance penalty as those guests are running within a virtual machine.

Any virtual machines made in VMware Workstation can be migrated to vSphere.

You can sign up for a 60 day evaluation of the whole vSphere suite here: Download VMware vSphere or vSphere with Operations Management Evaluation - Free Managed Virtualizati...

That way you can also work with the VCSA (vCenter appliance) to manage your virtual vSphere hosts.

Note you will have to disable the Hyper-V role in order to run VMware Workstation.

Hope this helps,

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Wil

[davida1992]

I appreciate the reply, thanks very much!

I don't really mind wiping my data, I can just pull it back from my Synology in terms of the data. Does the paid version have anything equivalent to Storage Pools?

Is there a pricing structure for this? I am assuming the pricing is going to be aimed more at businesses and not home uses though

Thanks again.

[wila]

Hi,

There's vSphere Essentials which is around EUR 600 but it doesn't include anything like storage pools.

Of course vSphere itself has support for storage adapters and you can have local storage on your machine with even the free hypervisor.

The additional storage support (vSAN) comes in variants of vSphere that are targeted at businesses.

For vSAN you need at least 3 hosts and it will make a storage pool of all the storage combined at the 3 hosts.

Your Synology would also be capable as in that it can make storage available via iSCSI or NFS.

In addition what might also work for you is getting a license via the user group: https://www.vmug.com/VMUG-Join/VMUG-Advantage

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Wil