Novice in VMware ESXi !

[Yaboto]

Hi,

A customer asked me to provide the following solution:

The customer said:

"We want 14 servers with Embedded VMware ESXi"

futher the customer explained:

"We hope to offer redundancy using a virtualization.The plan is to create the virtual machine images of all servers and store them on central storage on a daily/weekly basis. In case of emergency the image will be loaded on the servers runing the virtual Operating System. The system should be up and running again in lessthan five minutes."

I am a master engineer in implementing HP Data Center including SAN and Storage but I am very new to vertualization especially to VMWARE.
I don't know anything about VMWARE ESXi.

Please help me unerstand the solution.


Best Regards,

[wobbe · Accepted solution]

I sound to me that they want to make weekly backups (snapshots) to a network storage. In a case of emergency these snapshots can be started from the storage on another machine.
This can work, but since your going back in time so you could run into system account password authentication failures on windows based systems.

[Kapil Jha]

there are various things in VMware to do what ur customer is asking.

You can make a cluster in VMware so that if one physical machine goes down all the VMs would start on second machine in a very short span of time.

to backup things you have
1)snapshot
2)clone
3)template

you may have to understand the above 3 concept and they are pretty simple and quite efficient.

BR,
Kapil+

[Michal Kapalka (mikap)]

hi,

i think your customer should check this links to know what is included in each version :

http://blogs.vmware.com/esxi/2009/06/esxi-vs-esx-a-comparison-of-features.html

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1015000

in my opinion, lot of customers, like to cut the budget, and see the way in virtualisation, yes sure, that is very good way, but i think not with ESXi.

mikap

[Rob Buxton]

Vmware ESX/ESXi infrastructures make use of concurrently mounted storage.
This allows things like High Availability, which effectively restarts a virtual machine on another host if the underlying host fails. It allows vmotion to work which moves virtual machines between hosts depending on workloads. And allows you to do host maintenance without disruption. This is a licensed / costed product.
14 hosts is a big infrastructure. How many virtual servers are you running?

As regards backups, the virtual machines are effectively files on your SAN storage.
You'd need to start talking to your backup vendor about the options available.
You can also use SAN replication technologies to replicate the machines off-site.

[John O'Neill_6]

Heya Yaboto...

Just a hint dude, assign some 'points' to the people taking time out of their day to answer your questions, i've come across a ton of your questions recently that have recieved considered, detailed responses to your queries, it only takes a few moments to show some appreciation to these men and women here.

-John

[Yaboto]

Thanks for all your contributions.

Please tell me the difference between the following products:

1- VMware vSphere

2- VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager

3- VMware vCenter Server 4 Foundation

Best Regards,

[Michal Kapalka (mikap)]

hi,


1- VMware vSphere = its product name for ESX/ESXi 4.x

2- VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager

Check the page :

http://www.vmware.com/products/site-recovery-manager/

3- VMware vCenter Server 4 Foundation


Check the page :

http://vmware.mobi/products/vcenter/

Best Regards,

[Michal Kapalka (mikap)]

hi,

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mikap