Brian
First of all, welcome to Tech Geeks. We are all glad you are here.
Secondly, thank you for the information. I now have a name that I can
go to in case we get totally stuck........
BRIAN DICHTER wrote:
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
<mailto: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.
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--
Brian Dichter
District Technology Systems Supervisor
Township High School District 214
2121 Goebbert Road
Arlington Heights, IL 60005
brian.dich...@d214.org <mailto: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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