Hi. I'm new to this list but this seems like a good opportunity to jump in. 8)
At District 214, we have implemented a fairly substantial VI3 setup for over a year now. I had planned to upgrade to vSphere this past summer but ran out of time...hopefully will complete this by either Thanksgiving or Winter break. Our cluster (started off with three boxes) has seven ESX hosts, three storage arrays for shared storage and one physical VirtualCenter Server. Academic licensing is a good thing which is why we did go with ESX as opposed to ESXi; fortunately we were able to budget for this. We are currently operating more than 50 VMs in production (including both Windows 2003/2008 and CentOS 5.4) with plenty of excess capacity available. This year, we'll be migrating more physical boxes into the infrastructure but usually anything new is automatically considered for virtualization. As a result, we are replicating SAN snapshots (all iSCSI, btw) over our WAN to an array at one of our school sites but are interested in moving that and some other equipment entirely off-site eventually. We also have been able to measure a real reduction in energy and cooling usage; we've reduced our power consumption by nearly 25% so far, for example. Since we do have a high-availability cluster and take advantage of the vmotion features, we had practically zero downtime for any VMs running on the cluster: a few restarts and one goof-up on my part, but in the latter case I was able to restore the data completely from a snapshot. Virtualization has been and will certainly continue to be an ongoing learning experience and for people who work in educational environments who often wear multiple hats it's difficult to become an "expert" at many things but I think we've been fairly successful so far with our deployment. I think the biggest expense we had was for the storage but it's been highly reliable. Training is a must because there is a great deal of complexity (more hats to wear!). If anyone would like to learn more about our setup or to pick our brains, don't hesitate to contact me. 8) On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 9:23 AM, JimHays <hay...@sages.us> wrote: > OK. So who's the ESXi expert on this list? I need to bounce some ideas > off someone as we are about to embark on the virtualization road. > > | Subscription info at http://www.tech-geeks.org | > -- Brian Dichter District Technology Systems Supervisor Township High School District 214 2121 Goebbert Road Arlington Heights, IL 60005 brian.dich...@d214.org 847.718.6565 office 224.688.1863 mobile 847.718.7673 fax "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." -- Carl Sagan
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