[nylug-talk] Anyone running VMWare ESX in production?

[Lawrence Timmins]

If you're starting, VMware ESX 3.0.1 comes as either
Enterprise (run with a SAN) or standalone (i.e. for a
remote office, etc any server without a SAN).

The ESX Starter is new and very interesting.  It's
something you run on standard alone servers (ESX
Starter ~$1650 including $800+ ESX Starter license,
and 1 year of platinum support).

The standard ESX is designed to run with a SAN. 
(Remember VMware was bought by EMC for a reason).

ESX comes as part of the VMWare Infrastructure V3
which comes with ESX Server, VMotion, High
Availability, DRS, etc.   If you have more than one,
you can migrate running virtual machines that store
their "DISKS" (.vmdk) on the VMFS that is actually on
the SAN instead of the local server.

A Dell 2950 or a HP DL580 class server works fine -- I
added dual HBA fiber cards, plus two additional Quad
port 1GB Nic cards (total 10 NICs), and 16GB RAM to
each server.   If you ever want to know about VMware
ESX tuning, workloads, capacity planning, this setup
will avoid 95% of the problems even if you have a
server that is limited in the number of PCI/E slots it
has.  [Or else I would add one more dual HBA card).

Now you're cooking.  You can connect to the underlying
ESX "service console" via the web or a VI3 Client
(download once you connect via the web page when your
ESX server starts running.

Remember also, for the enterprise / standard ESX
server , you'll want to get the VMware Management
Console (pricey) which allows you to initiate the
VMotion, etc.

Remember, while ESX Server runs on your server, you
will need a Windows server (remember that 5% of the
problems that couldn't be avoided, this is a large
part of that uncertainty).  On the VI Console, you
will also need to install the License Server.  

You can always get started with VMware Workstation 6
(commercial product) or VMware Server (old name =
GSX).  Better yet, download VMPLayer on any hardware
you are running and grab off the net once of 100's of
virtual machines to see how it works -- remember to
check your sources. [Hint:  disable the virtual
machines' NIC access to your real network until you
know its friendly].

Best part of VMware -- its the early eighties all over
again with VM/SP/HPO2/XA on a desktop and small
servers instead of IBM/Amdahl/NAS mainframes.  All
those skills come in handy again -- that and some
years on hefty Linux server farms.   More down to
earth, you can build a Windows 2003 Server template or
a particular Linux install template, and then create
new VM's from the template in less than 10 minutes if
built right.

The worst part -- this is a stretch -- but it would
have to be the update process.  This changed since
Vmware ESX 2.5 and the new patch mechanism is not well
liked in the VMware forums.   There is no unified
patch management -- so that means you have to patch
your ESX Servers, then go an update the VMware Tools
that are installed into every one of your virtual
machines.   Since January 29th, there have been 5 or 6
major patch releases.  Imagine patching 16 ESX servers
and over 300  virtual machines just because of a patch
release.  And it happens more than monthly.  

Watch for a new / updated console but its not clear
that the problems with patch management will be
addressed.

All and all, it should sound like production concerns.

We have ported Informix databases to Linux (and
de-commissioned older hardware with escalating support
costs), Cognos environments, SMS 2003, etc to virtual
machines and all is working really, really well.

Can't say enough good things about running VMware in
production.

Larry T.
clickcharge at yahoo.com

 


       
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