Re: VCL andVMWare licensing/load balancing
What I have done to try to spread the load is to stagger the assignment of VMs. For example, if you have 5 ESXi hosts and 15 VMs: host1 - vm1, vm6, vm11 host2 - vm2, vm7, vm12 host3 - vm3, vm8, vm13 host4 - vm4, vm9, vm14 host5 - vm5, vm10, vm15 Also, vSphere 4.1 does not have limitations that impact most current hardware but you should be aware of the vSphere 5.0 licensing limitation of 32 GB of total RAM assigned to VMs per host. The good news is that VCL 2.3 will fully support KVM. :) -Andy On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 4:05 PM, Mike Haudenschild m...@longsight.com wrote: Hello to all. I've been tasked with building out and managing a VCL implementation that will utilize VMWare ESXi 4.1 hypervisors across 5 separate servers. I have trolled the existing documentation and listserv archive, but I have two burning questions: 1. I've read in another thread that VCL doesn't have load balancing capabilities per se as part of the scheduler. How does VCL equalize the load of virtual machines across several hypervisors? 2. I've found that the free VMWare hypervisor 4.1 license caps out at one physical processor (with 6 cores). Are most folks running a non-free VMWare license alongside VCL? I greatly appreciate any assistance that current VCL users and the dev team can provide! Regards, Mike -- *Mike Haudenschild* Education Systems Manager Longsight Group (740) 599-5005 x809 m...@longsight.com www.longsight.com
Re: VCL andVMWare licensing/load balancing
A bit off topic, but I'm *so* looking forward to VCL 2.3 with KVM, as at our site we've hit limits with both ESXi 4.1 (6 cores per socket, giving us only 24 of 32 cores on a fancy new 4 socket box), and with the RAM limits of ESXi 5.0. Anticipatingly, Terry McGuire On 9 Dec 2011, at 1333h, Andy Kurth wrote: Also, vSphere 4.1 does not have limitations that impact most current hardware but you should be aware of the vSphere 5.0 licensing limitation of 32 GB of total RAM assigned to VMs per host. The good news is that VCL 2.3 will fully support KVM. :)
VCL andVMWare licensing/load balancing
Hello to all. I've been tasked with building out and managing a VCL implementation that will utilize VMWare ESXi 4.1 hypervisors across 5 separate servers. I have trolled the existing documentation and listserv archive, but I have two burning questions: 1. I've read in another thread that VCL doesn't have load balancing capabilities per se as part of the scheduler. How does VCL equalize the load of virtual machines across several hypervisors? 2. I've found that the free VMWare hypervisor 4.1 license caps out at one physical processor (with 6 cores). Are most folks running a non-free VMWare license alongside VCL? I greatly appreciate any assistance that current VCL users and the dev team can provide! Regards, Mike -- *Mike Haudenschild* Education Systems Manager Longsight Group (740) 599-5005 x809 m...@longsight.com www.longsight.com
Re: VCL andVMWare licensing/load balancing
Mike, Our approach to load balancing is to put all of our VMs inside a vCenter cluster with dynamic resource scheduling enabled -- this allows vmware to move VMs around to balance the load. We can then have an arbitrary number of physical servers, but to the VCL it looks like a single vmhost. The downside of this approach is that you need to purchase VMware's enterprise license. As another precondition for this, your vmhosts can't use local storage for the datastores: they must use a SAN. We also had to write our own provisioning module to get this to work, but so far it is working very well. Aaron -- Aaron Coburn Systems Administrator and Programmer Academic Technology Services, Amherst College (413) 542-5451 acob...@amherst.edu On Dec 8, 2011, at 4:05 PM, Mike Haudenschild wrote: Hello to all. I've been tasked with building out and managing a VCL implementation that will utilize VMWare ESXi 4.1 hypervisors across 5 separate servers. I have trolled the existing documentation and listserv archive, but I have two burning questions: 1. I've read in another thread that VCL doesn't have load balancing capabilities per se as part of the scheduler. How does VCL equalize the load of virtual machines across several hypervisors? 2. I've found that the free VMWare hypervisor 4.1 license caps out at one physical processor (with 6 cores). Are most folks running a non-free VMWare license alongside VCL? I greatly appreciate any assistance that current VCL users and the dev team can provide! Regards, Mike -- *Mike Haudenschild* Education Systems Manager Longsight Group (740) 599-5005 x809 m...@longsight.com www.longsight.com
