VMWARE anyone clued up on it ?

[McBunny]

need to visualise my existing infrastructure (11-15 boxes) onto 2 or 3 new boxes

i will be using vmware due to other companies in the group going that direction.

but im unsure what i actually need to buy !!!

i ran their tool on their website and it said i needed VMware vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus Edition but isnt that just management tools ? whats esxi in relation to vpshere


can anyone help. i will phone a retailer but id rather not have the sales talk just want to know what i need

 

[David]

vsphere is the update of full esx client. dpeending on your requirements , you may be ok with just esxi, why not download it for free and see, it would seem you need some capturing software which is also free. can you afford downtime on these servers? because something like vmotion will require full esx (vsphere license)

 

[McBunny]

in the future we want to maintain a 100% uptime instant failover etc

i would download it but i have no hardware i could install it on to try

it would be installed on either dell r710's or r810's

 

[Magic Johnson]

McBunny there's a few project management companies that will really help you do this. Try consulting them, as opposed to VMWare directly.

 

[David]

right then you would need vsphere. in terms of modules you'd be after vmotion and the v management suite, in fact i would say go to vmware direct and ask for a free consultation, i just had one in my place from dell, as they are doing a special at the moment, they assess what you have, draw up a pland and advise for like £1.

 

[Paul_P1]

You won't need Enterprise Plus, the only diffference between Ent and Ent. Plus is the distributed switch, you won't need that in your environment. With enterprise, you'll get vMotion, HA, FT etc so 100% uptime isn't unacheivable. You will need some network storage with your solution though, have you thought about that, SAN, iSCSI, NFS etc?

 

[McBunny]

i already have a san so storage isnt an issue

cool if i dont need the distributed switch then thats good

 

[David]

vmotion will get him the uptime though?

 

[McBunny]

tried downloading both esx and esxi and no go on teh only machine i could test it on unsupported nic

ah well will just need to get the full server here then

 

[David]

install esxi on a quick desktop?

 

[McBunny]

that was on a quick enough desktop (e7500) it doesnt support the broadcom chip on the MB 57780