Using multiple servers to create an enviorment with VMWare

[mattmack8989]

Hey guys,

As far as my virtual environment experience goes, what I am used to seeing is something like a NetApp, and then one or two regular Dell Servers connected to the NetApp via a switch. The Dell Servers will get a type I Hypervisor put on them, and then I connect to the NetApp and see tons of additional storage space (let's say the NetApp had 20TB of drives). I can then create many VM's across the NetApp and across those one or two Dell Servers.

However, I was wondering if something different is possible. I current have a ton of servers that are not utilizing a virtual environment. I want them to so I can turn VM's on and shut them off as I please and so if one physical server goes down, I can have them run somewhere else.

What if I have 10 Dell PowerEdge Servers, each with 6 TB worth of hard drives in them. Can I take those 10 servers and use them like I would use the NetApp? In other words, can I combine all of those servers and make it so all of them are a virtual environment utilizing 60 TB of space?  If so, I am guessing I would need vSphere and vCenter in order to. Please correct me if I am wrong and throw any additional information at me. Thanks!

[npadmani · Accepted solution]

yes you can do that.

what you are asking for is offered by VMware VSAN and of-course to set it up, you need those 10 hosts you are talking about to be installed with ESXi OS 5.5 U1 or higher and a vCenter server to manage them so you can create a VSAN clsuter.

Please review hardware requirements carefully.

What is VMware vSAN? | Virtual SAN | VMware | CA

[HPU-ADM]

MattMack8989,

If you look at it this way, if you bring up all the 10 dell hosts with esxi installed and only local storage, you can create vm's on each one, but you can't "move" the vm's from one host to the other, even if you have vcenter managing each of the individual hosts.  This is where you would need shared storage.

But if you don't have external shared storage like a nas or san, but have physical servers each with local storage, you can instead virtualize the hosts and local storage using vSAN, Nutanix, Simplivity.  All do the same thing, they not only virtualize the compute part, but also virtualize the local storage so all the physical servers see the local storage as shared.

It's a great thing, but for us, we started using vmware before vsan came about.  So we have the blade servers and external storage.  I'd like to go to vsan, but

1. It's an additional per cpu cost.

2. It's simpler for us to upgrade/scale up/scale out our blades (compute) and san (storage) independently on our schedule and budget.

Sorry about the last part, i'll get off the soap box, the first 2 parts I hope answers your question.