On Sep 5, 2009, at 1:51 AM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
2. VMWare ESXi (free)
a. I have not yet actually used this, so tell me where I’m
wrong. Based on what I read on the internet …
b. You install bare metal. It’s supposedly a version of RHEL.
So you must be using RHEL supported hardware in order to install.
Yes and no. ESX and ESXi "started life" as RHEL, but that fork in the
road is long since in the past. You should check the VMWare HCL,
rather than the RHEL HCL.
c. The console client “vsphere client” is windows-only; you
can’t manage your VM’s from a mac or linux
True, but for our purposes, all of our Mac and Linux users have
(Fusion, VMWare Workstation) installed already so we install the
vSphere client inside the VM.
Our sales-person (we pay for the upgraded Enterprise licensing for 75%
of our servers) indicated that a Linux version was coming, but I've
been hearing that across two employers for five years, so I'm not
holding my breath.
d. Even though it’s supposedly RHEL, you can’t do normal linuxy
things, like login and get a command prompt. You can’t do much more
than just change your IP address.
It was far far far too easy to shoot yourself in the foot in the
Service Console. Because it smelled like RHEL, and acted like RHEL,
people treated it like it WAS RHEL, and would happily go installing
RPMs willy-nilly to get a "Service Console" environment that they
liked. This was a bad thing.
It's best to think of ESXi as an appliance. We buy our ESXi hosts as
largish blades (Dual-Nehalem, 96GB or 144GB of RAM), with no hard
drives, using the ESXi embedded from HP (which essentially ships with
a USB thumbdrive internally that hosts the ESX kernel on it). Once you
start viewing it as an appliance, life becomes more sane.
I've long ago lost the feeling that I need to be able to rip into
something's guts and muck about with it. Once something gets as rock-
steady as something like ESX has become for us, I'm happy to never
look under the hood again.
I wonder if there’s any way to backup your VM’s by copying the VM
files out of the host…. Because it’s not a normal host OS, I have
my doubts.
There is "VMware Consolidated Backup", which provides (allegedly, we
haven't tinkered with it) a "two-layer" backup view, using a single
backup. It's essentially an API that 3rd-party backup tools can talk
to (not sure if it's free to do so or not for those ISVs). The way it
works (as I read the documentation) is that a backup taken via VCB can
be used to solve either problem of "we lost the ESX server and need to
drop the VMs back onto a replacement server" (including the VM config
files, etc.), as well as the problem of "I need to restore the /var/
lib directory for the guest from yesterday."
If you plunk down the coin for Enterprise, you get a LOT of other very
nice features. DRS is quite nice, it's essentially automated resource
scheduling. If one host starts to get "bogged down" (on, let's say,
memory consumption), it will automatically determine what VMs should
be VMotion'ed (live migration) over to a less beat-up host so as to
balance the load across the cluster appropriately. Likewise, if you
put a host in "maintenance mode" (for example, to power it down, do
software upgrades to it, etc.), DRS will automatically VMotion all the
VMs off the host to other appropriate hosts. You also get varying
levels of "high availability", depending on your needs (up to and
including a single VM running, essentially, in active/passive mode on
two different hosts, in case one of them fails).
To gauge our level of commitment to ESX, I've got two data-centers,
plus our corp office, with about 15-20 ESXi Enterprise servers,
running a couple hundred VMs, with another 15 or so ESXi (Free)
servers running about 80 VMs (we don't spend the money for Enterprise
on the hosts that will be running our front-end VMs... we've
horizontally scaled that out well enough that if I need to do host
maintenance I'll just down a 'host' of 4 web front-ends, and not
bother VMotion/DRSing them off the host.
3. VMWare Workstation
a. This is one of the few products I’m reasonably happy with.
I run it on a vista 64 machine, with windows server, linux, and
solaris guests. It’s pretty solid.
YMMV, .... the Linux version does seem to be buggy as all hell.
4. VMWare Fusion
a. I never used it. Mac only. It looks like a direct
competitor of Parallels Desktop. I wonder what the pros/cons are
for Fusion vs Parallels
VMware Fusion is what I use on my Mac Book Pro, day in and day out,
for my "windows-only nonsense" (talking to the virtual-KVM on our HP
blade-center, using the VMware client, etc.) I have never ever had a
problem with it in any way. Which is saying a lot since I've been a
Fusion user since the pre-beta. I cannot recommend this product highly
enough.
Pros/Cons versus Parallels, for me, is that I can take a VM that I'm
using on my laptop, and fling it up to my ESXi server to start it up.
Or, if I want to, I can download a copy of one of our production VMs
to my desktop, and tinker with it via Fusion. And, at the end of the
day, I have a lot more faith in the long-term viability of VMWare
versus Parallels.
Cheers,
D
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