Kermit

Hi y'all,

I dont know much about VMWare....

But before we start talking to resellers, etc... Can anyone give me a ball park price for ESX ? Also how much is the clustering option ?

I assume its licensed on CPUs on the physical base machine?

Many thanks,

K.

apalmer

iTrader: (8)

Hi K

ESX can start from as little as £500 and is priced on a features and scale-out structure dependant on your requirements. The starter addition will give you all the standard features but limit you to the amount of RAM and CPU's that you can use.

If you have never used Vmware before then before you jump into bed with the Linux based version (ESX) than why not try the free version Vmware server to get to grips with the systems and using some of the more basic features. You will need to have licenses for your windows host however.

From there it is a fairly straight forward process to migrate to ESX server using your VMDK images

@dam

KiwiGTI

You can also get a 60 day trial of ESX.

Also a cheap way to get a server (if you don't have one) is to buy an HP ML110 G5 for £200 and it will run ESX (you'll also need an Intel Pro 1000GT Desktop Card and some more memory taking it to £280)

Also have a look at MS Hypervisor V and Xen - both very strong products that could easily displace VMWare.

Ian Cook

ESX is licensed per socket, cant tell you how much it is as im not sales (thank gawd) lol

To use the clister services (ie HA and DRS etc) you need Virtual Centre and Standard edition of ESX if i remember correctly. There is an enterprise edition as well i believe but i cant remember the differences between them, i only install it lol

XEN isnt realy an enterprise product as it has limitations, and Hypervisor V isnt out yet, but again it has limitations, they may in years to come be in a position to oust VMware from the Virtualisation marketplace but i cant see it happening very soon to be honest.

markr1963

And that's assuming VMware stands still and lets the others catch up. My bet is they won't.

KiwiGTI

I actually see no future, or a very limited future for VMWare as a company in its present state.

Virtualisation is being commoditised, it is becoming no big thing. It is already going to be included free with operating systems, i.e: Windows 2008 and this version of Windows Server will be adapted rapidly and quite aggressively by many corporates. Why pay for expensive VMWare licensing, and make no mistake, there aren't necessarily large cost savings to be made by going to VMWare, especially in a production environment.

More strategically we will see the virtualisation layer move down from the application and O/S layers to the hardware, and in fact Intel are planning to incorporate it into their chips which obviates the need for any software. In a few years, if not earlier, we will be running VMs directly on a CPU directly.

boxst

It'll take a good few years before that happens and hopefully by that time VMWare will have morphed enough to keep it ahead.

(I work for VMWare's parent)

Steve

markr1963

VMware is already available built in as a flash component on a number of vendors hardware. If the logical step is to have VMs available from the CPU or whatever, who's most likely to partner up with Intel/AMD? MS, Xen or VMWare? Place your bets...

druddle

You can buy Intel servers from people like Fujitsu Siemens, Dell, HP, etc with VMWare 3i "free" (for 60 days). 3i is the embedded hypervisor (usually on some sort of USB memory stick inside the machine) that means you dont need to install it on the internal system disks, it boots from the 3i USB drive.

I am currently involved in many VMWare projects for customers, and one Xen project. The difference in my opinion is product maturity, compared to Xen and MS. VMWare is a step ahead and years ahead in development and features. Yes it costs, but you are getting a truly enterprise product that does what it says on the tin. Biased ? Maybe, but it works and is reliable (especially when used with Netapp storage - sorry Steve )

Dave

David_Wallis

You having a laugh?? we have over 110 machines running on 5x HP DL580's running ESX 3.x

the cost of us deploying 110 DL380 / 360's, cooling, power, licencing extra's etc Id say we have saved a fair bit!

Once you've decided on VMFS, RDMs, Volumes / Luns / FCP / ISCSI



Ps.. booked that course in staines 27 / 28 / 29th may iirc

David_Wallis

Anyway, for me the big thing would be running an OS across multiple servers.

IE running 1 SQL box across say 5x DL585 G5's or SUN XW4600's

Shame the X86 architecture doesnt lend its self to this.

David

Ian Cook

Intel already own shares in VMware as do Cisco

Ian Cook

I'm under NDA so cant comment on that

KiwiGTI

No, not in a production environment where your servers are heavily/properly utilised.

If you have already consolidated by using a shared services model, web farms, SQL Clusters etc then the cost saving of going to VMWare would be minimal and may even be more to maintain the same performance.

Ian Cook

Have to say 99% of all Windows boxes are running at about 4-5% utilisation, this is why VMWare and other virtualisation technologies are so popular at the moment. VMWare/MS etc wouldnt be investing so much time and money if there was no market for it.

Every single company i have installed VMWare into has made considerable savings, and this is all production not just dev and test. 200 physical boxes into 8-10 is a hell of a saving on power and aircon, and especially rack space !

Hanley

Always makes me laugh when people refer to ESX as Linux based - ESX itself runs on a proprietary kernel called VMKernel, not connected to Linux in any way.

The VM Console, however, is based on a custom version of Red Hat Linux.

Ian Cook

LOL yep i get bored telling people its not Linux, so just dont bother anymore

David_Wallis

Depends on your business I suppose, We consolidated a lot of servers but typically most windows people dont run boxes beyond 30% cpu anyway...

We dont consolidate our SQL servers as VMWare just wouldnt provide the performance we need.. however for the servers we have consolidated it's good... not to mention the speed you can provision resources -especially when using templates.

as for production servers:

posted this before, dl360 2x Quad Core Xeon 3.x Ghz..

6 of these servers all running at the same load...



David

Hanley

I'm in the process of building our 3rd ESX cluster for any new production systems (excluding SQL, Oracle and Exchange).

6 ML580 G5's each with 2 x Quad Core CPU and 16GB RAM, these are monsters and with HA configured to lose maybe 2 hosts from the cluster (3 if you want to get risky) then it's a pretty cost effective, resilient system.

Anyone implementing this kind of infrastructure is going to save money in terms of rack space, cooling, electricity - not to mention the £180+ charge per port we pay BT.

druddle

Alot of the solutions I am putting together for customers involve ESX on blade server architectures (Fujitsu Siemens BX600 at the moment). Blades with dual CPU, quad core, 32Gb memory and a big HA/DRS cluster set up. The saving in footprint alone in datacentres is a compelling reason for customers to go this way.

Some more benefits we are seeing is Site Recovery Manager for DR sites. I know its in beta at the mo, but we are about to start a beta test for it in a site on London. Also Storage VMotion for moving data from old to new storage live is good, its in its early stages so is command line driven at the moment but later versions will be more user friendly (read "have a nice GUI").

Also, the easy P2V migration capabilities of tools like Platespin Powerconvert are making the jump from physical to virtual easier still. Platespin-ned a Win2003 server with 20Gb of data on the system disk in 29 minutes last week. That was from start of the process to having the VM up and on the network (wasnt a live migration, thats even cooler !!). Also Netapp have got a new version of Snapdrive coming in May that will work on Windows VMs, which makes provisioning their storage a whole lot easier.

So I guess what I am saying is that VMWare (and others) are making the tools available to move on from just virtualisation of servers to offer far more functionality that makes the IT infrastructure slicker.

Dave

Hanley

Yeah we're using NetApp storage on our VM infrastructure, looking forward to the new Snapdrive.

VMotioning a live server from one host to another still makes me smile, even after seeing it so many times.

druddle

The only bummer with Snapdrive v6 is that it still doesnt support FC to MSCS virtual clusters (only iSCSI), and the first version only supports RDMs, no VMFS datastores.

David_Wallis

Was having this conversation with someone from VMWare this morning, I believe we are on the early adopter program for snap drive and snapmgr.

You got any info on the VMOTION for storage, something like that could be quite handy

As for the VMOTION on live servers, Maintanance mode for a host is the most useful I think.

David

David_Wallis

just had a look at https://www.vmware.com/products/vi/storage_vmotion.html

Going to drop a server into maintance mode tomorrow and update it to the latest version.. Hopefully we should be licenced for this as it will save me some serious work in decommisioning the old EVA and migrating to the Netapp for our VI infrastructure.

Would have been well pissed if I hadnt see this prior to powering them off and moving the storage resources around..

David

NotoriousREV

I'm sorry but your view of the world is not the same as everyone else's. We've just gone from physical web farm, physical SQL clusters etc. and moved to an entirely VM infrastructure.

The cost savings are huge when you take into account your overall cost of ownership. Procurement is easier (we've standardised on a single server type and buy a years worth of server hardware at a time which allows us to negotiate better discounts from vendors), everything is a standard build, power consumption is reduced, air handling is cheaper, I don't need a data centre the size of a small planet (comparing against IBM blades here, BTW so server density was already pretty good) and performance/capacity planning is easier and quicker.

In fact, just by halving my CPU count I've reduced licensing costs by over £100k this year (until that vendor realises everyone's going virtual and changes their licensing model!)

And if your talking about heavily utilised servers, we service around 30 million users annually so we're not afraid of a little usage

finalzero

I completed a migration from physical servers to 30 VMWare serves (that's 30 physical servers running ESX with two virtual servers in each 2U rack).

I did this 2 years ago when ESX wasn't known outside of corporate walls and I always rated it back then. It's come a long way now, much more stable, more compliant and supports a wider range of configurations so I don't see an issue with it.

My current employer has just started migrating some of the servers to ESX so we can host virtual servers and provide these as virtual dedicated solutions to our customers.

I run an ESX server at home that hosts a Windows 2003 Server, Debian Linux hosting Zimbra Mail Server and another VM hosting Linux to handle my firewall/routing stuff.

My workstation runs VMWare 6.1 which for a developer is a god send. With VMWare I am able to fire up a Win2k3 with SQL 2005, do my testing etc all from the comfort of my desktop, thanks to the new features I can debug apps on the virtual machine through Visual Studio now.

My workstation is a Dual P4 Xeon box with 4GB ram and I have successfully run 3 Win2k3/Windows 2000/Linux VM's concurrently without any issues on performance as I am able to configure the memory/cpu resources so I can get the best out of the dual cpu machine. On the latest dual core systems VMWare makes a lot of sense both from an academic point of view and as a professional tool for a Support/Sys Admin/Developer person.

ESX when used properly is very efficient, being able to image your VM's, push them to a SAN or NAS devices and then recover them without virtually any major downtime pays for itself (no more having to reimage a server and then spend hours trying to bring the system back online, with the VM image you just drop it in place and fire it up).

ESX also offers features to allow you to build a virtual switched network for some really cool stuff.

From experience the initial outlay for setting an ESX/VMware environment is expensive however over time it really does pay for itself and can in the right setup reduce your TCO by 50%.

On the desktop level it doesn't hurt to try out something like VirtualBox - open source and almost on par with VMWare.

druddle

Was talking to one of the Netapp PS guys about this last week. I have some scripts (as its CLI at the moment) to do some SVMotion stuff, will dig them out at work later and send them on.

Also I think I finally understand Fractional Reserve now.....

Dave

David_Wallis

LOL @ Fractional Reserve..

Just dont try snaping a volume at the command line when space guarantee isnt set correctly, as it takes the lun offline pretty quick

Which PS Guys do you deal with, I've Used Steve W, Ian N, Eddie S, Ant.

all seem pretty good..

David