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Just checking in to say I've completed a migration at work from 3x Dell 2950s running the free ESXi and local storage to 3x R520s with 96GB RAM each, dual Xeon E5-2450 and an HP P2000 G3 SAN with the vSphere Essentials Plus kit and finished the migration off this evening. Sort of learnt by doing over the past few years but will be hanging around in here to hopefully help out people in similar situations and pick up some tips for larger deployments.
Thanks Ants fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Jul 12, 2013 |
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Jul 12, 2013 01:17
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 06:41 |
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We're in the UK so these prices are ex VAT and in GBP. SAN with 10x 600GB 2.5" SAS disks and 12 3.5" 1TB NLSAS and switches was £12500 about 8 months ago, VM hosts were just over £4000 each and bought last week. Software license was £1500 with production support since we are education, but I think it's still pretty cheap if you aren't.
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Jul 12, 2013 09:32
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Am I missing something or is Windows Azure exactly what you want? 90 day trial as well so you can probably get the certs before you need to pay anything.
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Jul 12, 2013 21:15
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^ That. Essentials Plus seems designed for what you want it for, unless you need things like Fault Tolerance, Storage vMotion, DRS, DPM etc then I'd stick with Essentials Plus and save a ton of cash. The R520s are great little boxes and very well priced, but I'd get the dual 8 core CPUs since Essentials Plus limits you on socket count. Use the cash you've saved to move to 15k SAS or a unified box with SSD caching if it will stretch that far.
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Aug 2, 2013 17:40
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I found this (and the documents linked from it) very helpful when trying to get my head around multipathing when I first set up an iSCSI SAN for VMware. http://jpaul.me/?p=413
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Aug 14, 2013 18:44
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Weird Uncle Dave posted:Couple hours ago, I went through the free training for this. And by training, I mean "basically a three-hour VMware ad with no content whatsoever". I found it a little bit useful in terms of sorting out the hundreds of terms that are used to explain various things, it's all stuff I knew from having used the product but there are worse ways to prove you have a slight clue of what you're talking about. I'm in the same position re:VCP so I'm hoping I can throw this on a resume and end up working somewhere that sees the point in training people. I definitely don't regard it as anything to shout about though.
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Aug 28, 2013 22:43
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If you're just running Windows on it then a bunch of Server 2012 R2 Datacenter licenses and Hyper-V would be cheaper than VMware, but there's a cost involved in the form of System Center to manage it all properly. But it's a weird question because everything has a non-zero cost. If the issue is capex then run things in Azure rather than trying to hack something together.
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Mar 1, 2014 22:06
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Is there a difference in the XenServer version on the XenServer.org website vs. the Citrix page?
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Mar 2, 2014 02:38
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Can you not just set the 10GbE path as active, and the 1Gb as standby? Or am I missing something here?
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Mar 19, 2014 23:35
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:Groan, I just tried to migrate from a 5.1 vCenter to 5.5 for the experience of it, and while SSO works on the new 5.5 server, and I've added domain admins as to the administrator group in the web client, when I log on with a domain admin account, while it is successful in logging in, I can't perform any actions and it doesn't see the vCenter server at all: My memory is hazy on this one but there's a vCenter group that you need to add your AD group to. I can't be more helpful as I don't have access to the server that I set this up on, and it was about 8 months back. But you're not alone in finding it a pain in the arse. Edit: That will teach me to not refresh before replying.
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Mar 28, 2014 22:22
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what'd I gloss over?
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The confusion is that the thick client is completely useless now unless you have a vCenter Server, so everyone running actual production stuff on a free hypervisor got a bit irritated and loud. Connect the client to one of the hosts as opposed to the vCenter instance and you'll see what I mean. But the focus is very much on the web interface going forward, and I'm in two minds about that. It's great for me because I use a Mac and got bored using a Windows VM to manage vSphere.
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Mar 28, 2014 23:18
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All the cool stuff comes with SCVMM though, which is a non-trivial thing to set up, whereas vCenter can just be deployed as a virtual appliance and left to sort itself out. If you're a Windows shop though then yeah, Hyper-V makes a lot of sense.
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Mar 28, 2014 23:46
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It's not super clear, and I'm not sure what terminology VMware use, but if there's no mention of it affecting 5.1 Update 1 / Update 2 then does that mean that it's only a problem on 5.1?
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Apr 2, 2014 22:55
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Your other option is to run a Windows 7 VM and then Windows 98 inside that and pass what the Windows 7 computer sees as a hardware serial port through to the VM running Windows 98. But that's a very inception way of doing things. Edit: It's on-topic to the thread title though! Thanks Ants fucked around with this message at 20:25 on May 6, 2014 |
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May 6, 2014 20:20
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I'm surprised there aren't network serial servers that talk directly to VMware and show up as a hardware port to be used in a VM. Maybe there are?
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May 6, 2014 21:11
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I spy Netgear and Linksys switches
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Jun 8, 2014 02:23
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I put VCSA in when it was version 5 (I think, it was a while back). It was horrible.
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Sep 10, 2014 22:42
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adorai posted:It's still not great, but it has improved immensely. We still have to restart ours regularly, which may or may not have to do with XenDesktop, not quite sure. I just remember a fairly lengthy ordeal getting it to talk to AD, something to do with the SSO part of it being almost not there. Edit: I just remembered that most of my issues were caused by certain privileged accounts that had access to set up the integration stuff having default credentials different to the one that ran on Windows, and not featured in any of the documentation. That was a fun day.
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Sep 10, 2014 23:25
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Do people have an opinion one way or the other on the Windows cluster-in-a-box products like the Fujitsu CX420? One SKU gets you the chassis, two nodes, shared storage, and 2x Windows Server Datacenter licenses. It looks like a decent option for SMB virtualisation where the requirements are perhaps for lots of application servers rather than heavy DB loads or VDI, etc. Other than the obvious lack of expansion without buying a SAN, am I missing anything?
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Sep 29, 2014 10:16
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Nukelear v.2 posted:I've been eyeing the Dell VRTX for awhile now to virtualize our low priority office support machines. Same concept except 4 nodes, which to me is the minimum number you'd want for something like this. The lack of expansion and a single point of failure are your obvious downsides. I priced up a VRTX through our partner pricing and with 2 nodes its within £70 of the Fujitsu. I'll take that for the expansion options.
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Sep 30, 2014 16:47
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Why were you even doing the whole VDI thing if you have real PC hardware on the clients and the ability to manage them effectively?
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Oct 2, 2014 02:03
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Moey posted:I support this argument.
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Oct 4, 2014 01:58
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skipdogg posted:What's pricing on the VRTX and different EVO Rails solutions look like? VRTX is pretty inexpensive, it's priced for the market it's aimed at, which is why it has the ability to be a tower instead of a rackmount unit and has "office level" acoustics. Has anyone looked at the Dell PowerEdge FX stuff yet?
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Nov 7, 2014 21:47
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Martytoof posted:Oh wait, nevermind, it just took like half a year to start. vcsa_problems.txt
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Nov 9, 2014 01:11
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A Mac mini? Or a NUC. SLAT is just another word for EPT according to Wikipedia.
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Nov 22, 2014 00:51
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Knighty21 posted:I'm currently assigning 4 cores to each box (I was giving two cores to each when my host had 4 cores + HT so figured doubling them on this host made sense). Could this actually be hurting performance? Yes. http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/how-too-many-vcpus-can-negatively-affect-your-performance/
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Dec 3, 2014 20:11
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Is that the BIOS on the host or a guest setting?
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Dec 17, 2014 00:42
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It sounds like your CIO thinks OpenStack is just like vSphere but without the licensing costs.
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Dec 26, 2014 23:50
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Is this any good? http://www.cloudbase.it/hyper-v-promiscuous-mode/ I had to do something similar in vSphere to get a VPN concentrator to work properly.
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Dec 28, 2014 18:22
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GnarlyCharlie4u posted:So I have about a week or so to learn both oVirt and Openstack, and get them to share resources. 
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Dec 30, 2014 03:50
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What do these servers do? Not everything is a candidate for virtualisation.
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Dec 30, 2014 17:37
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I did not know about USB devices being shared around via IP, that's very handy.
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Dec 30, 2014 17:46
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The RS-232 stuff might be replaceable with something like http://www.brainboxes.com/ethernet-to-serial As far as the computer is concerned once the drivers are installed it's a hardware serial port. With the exception I think of dumping voltage across serial pins, check first. Stuff that loops video I'd probably look to replace with a digital signage player.
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Dec 31, 2014 13:10
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Rhymenoserous posted:2. Sort the time options: Google is your friend. Last I read the current practice is install vmtools or what the gently caress ever retarded off brand virtualization you are using, have it pull from the ESX server and have ESX pull from an external NTP source. I use the US Navies http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1318
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Jan 1, 2015 17:55
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. Microsofts is good too.
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Dell DPACK will do that.
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Jan 6, 2015 16:18
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Hooly gently caress. The only way this is going to save money over a few new hosts + vSphere Essentials Plus is if your time costs gently caress all. In which case, condolences.
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Jan 7, 2015 21:48
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Number19 posted:I was considering it too but then I realized that all the config is done "in my butt" and that if I ever decide not to renew my subscriptions I am stuck with the config as is until the end of time. That soured me enough on the concept to make me look elsewhere. IIRC Meraki stuff will flat out stop working, it won't just hold the last config that was pushed to it. I don't see it as a huge issue, I just see the management licenses as being like the support contracts that I keep all the other stuff covered by.
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Jan 7, 2015 22:47
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Hyper-V looks attractive once you're buying Datacenter licenses, but with the recent changes around the licensing of System Center I'd see what the actual price is to get something comparable to a vSphere Standard w/vCenter.
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Jan 9, 2015 02:23
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http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/about-licensing/briefs/win2008-virtual.aspx It's licensed per pair of sockets, hypervisor doesn't matter.
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Jan 23, 2015 01:05
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 06:41 |
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There's also the remote office branch office packs which aren't limited on the amount of hosts but have a hard limit on the number of VMs you can run. For most use cases I'd have thought an Essentials Plus kit is the way to go.
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Feb 5, 2015 00:58
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