asked on 9/6/2011

Virtual Machine

Pls advise me whether my situation suites wo use VM.
I had more than 10 servers, all are new and I do not planned to migrate them to VM.
I only want to setup new dept and let them use VM where they need quite a huge space of harddisk + Menory with their software. I need to have a failover environment too.
By starting to use this, I might migrate other future in the future, I want to see how stable is the VM environment.
Pls advise me whether to proceed

VMware

Last Comment

swpui

9/14/2011

Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

9/6/2011

If they need to use "huge disk space" and "huge memory", there Virtual Machines are probably not the best candidates for Virtualisation or Virtual Machines.

VMware vSphere Hypervisor is the new name for ESXi.

The free download is available from here

http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/overview.html

You need to register to download for free.

The latest versions is ESXi 5.0

Here are the documents for ESXi 4.1.
http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vs_pages/vsp_pubs_esxi41_i_vc41.html

Getting Started Guide
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r41/vsp_41_esxi_i_get_start.pdf

Please make sure you server is on the Hardware Compatibility List

http://www.vmware.com/go/hcl
http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php
http://partnerweb.vmware.com/comp_guide2/search.php

and you use a 64 bit server and enable Intel Virtualisation Tecnology also called Intel-VT.

JRoyse

9/6/2011

One great reasons to go virtual for other departments is you can with the vCenter product partition off virtual machines with permission like you would file shares.

You could give the new department a user/password that they could only control "their" Virtual servers - and they could "remote control" them with the vmware console software - like having an KVM-over-IP so the IT department won't be bothered by small stuff, it may empower your users.

swpui

9/8/2011

ASKER

Attached to show you the requirement, if I would like to convert it to VM environment, how's the diagram should be changed? Failover is a must. What if I did not use VMware but MS hyperV?
ispec.jpg
idiagram.jpg

Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

9/8/2011

I would download and evaluate VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V to test these virtual machines, they are very large and may not be suitable for virtualisation.

VMware Supports failover called HA (High Availability), but you would need to VMware vSphere Hosts, and Shared Storage e.g. SAN or NAS. If a host should fail, the VMs would be restarted automatically on the other hosts, an outage of a few minutes whilst the VMs are restarted.

VMware High Availability - Decrease Downtime and Reduce Risk
http://www.vmware.com/products/high-availability/overview.html

VMware High Availability (HA) Product Briefs
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/ha_datasheet.pdf
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/VMware-High-Availability-DS-EN.pdf

swpui

9/8/2011

ASKER

Hanccocka, you mean the diagram I attached seems very large scale and VM did not suitable for this environment?

Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

9/8/2011

Correct, I would test before committing to such a project to check performance.

swpui

9/10/2011

ASKER

How am I going to test as I do not have additional server nor software

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION