Yep, ESXi can run off a USB flash drive or a SD card. It's fully supported by VMware and often by the vendor as well (I know HP does). There are a few caveats such as needing a location for scratch space, and a couple of other similar things.
DAMIEN SOLODOW Systems Engineer 317.447.6033 (office) 317.447.6014 (fax) HARRISON COLLEGE From: David Mazzaccaro [mailto:david.mazzacc...@hudsonmobility.com] Sent: Tuesday, April 03, 2012 12:50 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: New to virtualization I am still researching and meeting w/ vendors. One thing that has just come up w/ a particular vendor. They are telling me that they would put in 3 hosts, w/ no hard drives and that VMware would run off a USB stick??? This sounds pretty cheesy to me... is this common practice? What are the pros/cons to USB stick vs a pair of mirrored drives on the hosts? From: Paul Hutchings [mailto:paul.hutchi...@mira.co.uk]<mailto:[mailto:paul.hutchi...@mira.co.uk]> Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2012 10:44 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: New to virtualization The reality here is that you're not going to spend $130k on a virtualisation solution and not want to add more VM's, Honestly, just add DataCenter from the get-go - you'll make use of it I guarantee it. From: Jonathan Link [mailto:jonathan.l...@gmail.com] Sent: 15 March 2012 14:03 To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: New to virtualization I admit it was a while back, it may have changed, or my understanding was incorrect. Or someone told me that and I read it that way. In any event, I think 12 total servers for his environment may be a bit low... Or it may not be. With Datacenter licensing, if he loses a host, he can move the guests to the other machines and do some back of the hand guestimate based on load balancing not licensing. On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 10:51 PM, Ken Schaefer <k...@adopenstatic.com<mailto:k...@adopenstatic.com>> wrote: No this is incorrect. Check the Microsoft Windows Server licensing guide: http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/D/9/0D9DDF52-A855-487B-9B74-5A09A9389551/Windows%20Server%20System%20Center%20and%20Forefront%20Pricing%20and%20Licensing%20Guide.pdf You can move individual VOSE licenses between Enterprise Hosts, provided that no host ends up exceeding the 1 POSE + 4 VOSE limit per enterprise license. For more than 4 VOSEs on a physical host, you need 2 (or more) enterprise licenses. Check out page 8 on the document above - has this exact example in a diagram. Cheers Ken From: Jonathan Link [mailto:jonathan.l...@gmail.com<mailto:jonathan.l...@gmail.com>] Sent: Thursday, 15 March 2012 1:24 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: New to virtualization It's even a more (unenforcebly) stringent than that. If you run 4 VMs on 3 hosts with enterprise server on each host, you power down two and do a switch, you're in a licensing violation situation. Technically, you have to move all 3 from one host to another. So single licensing or Datacenter, or some oddball combination of single licenses and enterprise licenses (DAMHIKT). Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but that's the way I read the license. And I prefer to play it straight/conservative. I'll look forward to your response in about 4-6 hours. On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 11:00 AM, Miller Bonnie L. <mille...@mukilteo.wednet.edu<mailto:mille...@mukilteo.wednet.edu>> wrote: And I'm not familiar with the HP hardware, so it's very possible they can-I just didn't see anything about clustering in the original post. Why it's important is one thing MS had told us is if you are planning on clustering, in an environment like this, you are out of compliance with licensing as soon as you migrate the 5th VM over to a server that is only running Enterprise edition (such as to down one of the 3 servers for patching). That is of course, unless you own separate individual server licenses for those VMs. From: Andrew S. Baker [mailto:asbz...@gmail.com<mailto:asbz...@gmail.com>] Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 1:50 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: New to virtualization I have VM hosts at home that can support 6-8 hosts easily. At the office, we have hosts that can support 15-20 VMs pretty easily. Of course, this depends on the workload of the boxes, but for all but the most extreme workloads, this is probably doable. If you build each host to support 30-40% more VMs than normal, then you can suffer a failure of one of them without great difficulty. ASB http://XeeMe.com/AndrewBaker Harnessing the Advantages of Technology for the SMB market... On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 1:59 PM, Miller Bonnie L. <mille...@mukilteo.wednet.edu<mailto:mille...@mukilteo.wednet.edu>> wrote: I don't see any mention of failover clustering. Right now, how much do you lose if one server is down? How much would you lose if 4 servers were down instead? Just a thought, but you could add another host server, or stick with three, run datacenter, and build them with enough guts to run 6 VMs each. That also gives you the ability to spin up test servers, etc, as you mentioned. From: David Mazzaccaro [mailto:david.mazzacc...@hudsonmobility.com<mailto:david.mazzacc...@hudsonmobility.com>] Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 8:04 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: New to virtualization Hi all, I am starting to investigate moving our aging network infrastructure into the virtual world. ~ 10 servers, 6-7 years old Windows 2003 domain Exchange 2003 Citrix 4.0 farm ~190 users After some initial discussions w/ a reseller, here's what they are recommending: (3) DL 380 G7 servers (to host the VMs) ~$18,000 (1) Net App FAS2240 (this is the SAN that would host 12 600GB drives of storage for the VMs) ~$20,000 VMWare essentials plus kit (VMware software) ~$5200 (3) MS Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise (this would allow the 3 HP servers to run 4 Windows 2008 VMs each) I guess the way it would work is that the VMs would reside on the SAN, and the 3 hosts would call up the SAN to load each VM utilizing the host's CPU, RAM, NIC, etc.)... right? I have meetings scheduled w/ 2 other vendors, but verbally both have started the conversation along the same path as above. Being very new to VM, does the above scenario seem to make sense? It is hard for me to imagine all that traffic going between the SAN and the host servers w/o creating a huge bottleneck (over gig Ethernet) Do people recommend virtualizing every server? Domain controllers? Exchange? Citrix farm (4 server)? Shouldn't something be left physical? Is 7 TB of storage enough (probably only 3 usable after array config)? Is the net app a decent appliance? $20k sounds cheap to me... I have done a little more reading, and from what I understand w/ 3 Windows Enterprise licenses, I would be limiting myself to 12 VMs. However, if I went w/ 3 Windows Datacenter licenses, for a small increase in price - I would get unlimited VMs? Which would allow for actually having a testing environment, and better patch deployment? 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