No, something is not correct with your license. All standard ESX 3i
licenses support all VM functionality except the ability to move VMs
around while they are running (Vmotion). Ensure that your hypervisor
isn't mounting the NFS volume as read only (which is an option for ESX
to do).
Also, make sure to get the license found here:
https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/index.php?p=esxi
Best,
Brian
Brian Bouterse
Secure Open Systems Initiative
919.698.8796
On May 6, 2009, at 8:02 AM, 乔木 wrote:
Thank you very much. It's clear now.
One more question, I see that the API of the free ESX 3i version only
support read-only operations like monitoring. When I firstly
installed ESXi
and didn't use the free license, I have 60 days' evaluation and VCL
could
successfully do all operations. But when I used the free license, some
features were removed and VCL could not register VM correctly.
Does it mean we should always use evaluation mode to support VCL's
operation?
2009/5/6 Brian Bouterse <[email protected]>
Regarding NFS, below are a few practical reasons to not use local
hard
disks to host the images as they run.
1) Say each image is 10GB, on a 72GB hard drive (the standard
"large"
drive in a blade), that means as a maximum consolidation you can
only have 7
VM's on a blade. A blade can likely handle between 4 - 30 VMs
depending on
how powerful it is, so this would be a gross underutilization.
2) It takes a VERY long time to copy images to and from the blades
(3-6
MB/s) because of the difficult file system translation between to
and from
the VMFS filesystem format on the hypervisor.
3) ESX 3i (the free, efficient hypervisor) is designed to boot as a
disksless hypervisor, so ESX3i environments would be out which
would reduce
the number of folks who could do this dramaticlly
4) Although it seems performance counter-intuative, actually if
booting
from an actual storage system with multiple disks, VMs will perform
quicker
when booting over the network. Consider the HD thrashing that
would occur
if a single disk were really handling the I/O operations of 20VMs
on a
single hypervisor. Believe it or not, the network is faster.
5) While not possible with VCL today, if the instance images live
on the
network natively, the opportunity to do things like Vmotion aren't
totally
out of the question, but those are not at all possible with local
disk boot.
In regards to image re-using, your configuration is not correct.
It sounds
like you need to create a few more computer "slot" entries in the
computer
table and link those slots to your hypervisor entry in the computer
table.
The number of "slots" you have equals the number of virtual
machines that
can run concurrently. Notice it actually copies it from
/golden/<image_name>/ to /inuse/<slot_name>. Once a slot is created,
remember to associate it with a hypervisor through the "Virtual
Hosts" area.
If you still can't get this, post up some of the lines in your
computer
table's DB.
Best,
Brian
Brian Bouterse
Secure Open Systems Initiative
919.698.8796
On May 6, 2009, at 2:07 AM, 乔木 wrote:
Hi,
We have setup the environment for VM provision on ESXi recently.
We are
confused about some mechanisms:
- Images are stored in NFS
As I see, VCL stores images in NFS and just copy it locally when
using it.
It means that the hardisk in the esxi hypervisor will not be used.
All the
VMs are stored in remote computer and all the operations will be
remote
operation (CPU exsits in Hypervisor but hardisk exsits in NFS). I
think it
may lead performance problems. Although we can setup mutiple NFS
servers,
it
is not good that the hardisk in the hypervisor is not used and all
the
operations will be remote in my opinion. Why not transfer the
image to the
esxi hypervisor which will run the image?
- Image reusing
When we use an image from repository, VCL does: 1. copy the image
form
/golden/<image_name> to /inuse/<image_name>, 2. start the image.
It's
difficult for image reusing. It's impossible for mutiple machines
to use
the
same image because the copy operation will only copy one image to
the
/inuse
folder and that image can be used only for one esxi hypervisor.
Other copy
operation will overwrite that image. Again, if we transfer the
image to
hypervisor, there won't be such problem.
--
Best wishes,
乔木
MOE KLINNS Lab and SKLMS Lab, Xi'an Jiaotong University
Department of Computer Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong
University
TEL: 15991676983
E-mail: [email protected]
--
Best wishes,
乔木
MOE KLINNS Lab and SKLMS Lab, Xi'an Jiaotong University
Department of Computer Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong
University
TEL: 15991676983
E-mail: [email protected]
