On Jun 19, 2009, at 1:00 PM, Neil Neely wrote: > ESXi vs ESX is something to explore as well - ESXi gives you an > appliance shell, ESX gives you a regular shell and is basically RHEL > 3 so you can muck with it a bit more. ESXi wasn't an option when we > deployed, but I believe it would have been a viable option for > us(with relevant enterprise licenses added to it). I intend to > maintain a dual environment down the road - one with servers managed > in vCenter with all the clustering goodness, and another pool of > ESXi boxes with local storage for services that have different > requirements.
Consider using ESXi everywhere. You can always just apply your enterprise licenses to ESXi hosts, giving them all the enterprise functionality. HOWEVER, the sweet thing about ESXi is it can be purchased "embedded", usually for $(n<100) per host. So, in our case, for example, we order HP blades with "ESXi Embedded Standalone", and inside the blade, sitting on an internal thumbdrive, is a tiny version of the free ESXi environment. We just reconfigure its license so it points to our license server and it gets a full-blown enterprise license. The advantage here is that -- in most peoples' ESX environments -- they don't need local storage, they're using a SAN/NAS for their VM storage. Why pay to spin up media in blades or pizza-boxes that is going to waste? It's a heckuvalot cheaper to power a thumbdrive or other embedded- media (your vendor's method may vary) than it is to spin the 10KRPM platters on 1-2 boot drives. And as we all know, power is pretty much the biggest recurring cost any of us have these days.... D _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
