vSphere 4.1 ESX vs ESXi

[marcin8]

Hi,

I am going to upgrade my infrastructure from 4.0 to 4.1 in two weeks time. I run 3 x ESX servers. I'm just wandering about one thing... Do you think that I should start using ESXi? When I deployed first the first server few years ago it was ESX and then, whenever upgrading, always sticked to ESX edition but maybe I should change my habit ???

What do you think?

Cheers,
Marcin.

[schepp]

You might want to do that. Because vSphere 5 has no ESX anymore, only ESXi.

ESXi needs less space and less updates, so less maintenance downtime for each host.

You might need to do some work when migrating to ESXi, depending on if you have 3rd party tools installed on your ESX servers, like APC network shutdown etc. Those 3rd party tools need to be migrated to the vMA to use them with ESXi.

I'm running ESX and ESXi together right now, so I can do a soft migration without any VM downtime.

You can find a basic comparison between ESX and ESXi here:

http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/esxi-and-esx/compare.html

Regards

[egroeg1]

I would recommend upgrade to 4.1 ESX at the moment.

The upgrade path using the Host Update utility is atually quite a good excersize to conduct using the VMWARE Host baselines adn esx 4.1 u1 is very similar if not a few tweaks and additions to 4.0

Then when you're comfortable with that, perhaps look at the ESX to ESXi migration path bearing in mind all of the feature sets you'll "loose" or "gain" - such as the service console and management agents if you're already using these???

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVQzPGKKVco

We're staying on 4.1 u1 until upgrade to ESXi5 within the next 2 - 3 months once it's "bedded" in.

[AndreTheGiant]

See also: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-11113

But the doc is old, and ESXi 4.1 has fill the gap with ESX.

The only problem is that there isn't an upgrade path from ESX 4.x to ESXi 4.1... so you need a migration (and a reinstall).

This could be a possible reason to stay with ESX 4.1 and wait for ESXi 5 (where seems that there will be an upgrade path ALSO for ESX).

Andre

[marcin8]

Thanks for your suggestions guys. I went for ESX. The migration process was pain-free