VM Ware gurus - advice on which version I might need

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lchiu7

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#108816 6-Sep-2012 09:32

Looking at the possibility of putting up 3 servers, each with no more than 2 cores and 32GB RAM and creating 6 VM's.

Ideally I would like to have them boot from a common storage pool connected via iSCSI. Two of the servers would be main production and one idling so that should one of them have a hardware problem, the 3rd could be fired up to boot from the LUN for that server images that has gone down.

No need to move VM's around and the workload is fairly static.

Just wondering which version of VMWare I would need to do this?

I was thinking of VMware vSphere Essentials and Essentials Plus.

Does that sound right?

Thanks

Staying in Wellington. Check out my AirBnB in the Wellington CBD. https://www.airbnb.co.nz/h/wellycbd PM me and mention GZ to get a 15% discount and no AirBnB charges.

CB_24

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#682155 6-Sep-2012 09:46

VMware vSphere Essentials will do it, but check out this site to compare what features you might need:
http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vsphere/compare-editions.html

gished

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#684254 11-Sep-2012 10:35

I'd go with Essentials Plus. 5.1 has some improvements with the VSA which would be ideal for a 3 server / low vm:host ratio. It's also got HA and vMotion capabilities.

Alternatively, dare I say, you could look at Hyper-V if these VM's are all windows based (v3.0 can apparently handle certain Linux VM's). Hyper-V core server is free and has quite a few features that VMware only offer on the higher end license.

Zeon

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#684298 11-Sep-2012 11:46

Hmm I would probably go with VMware Essentials Plus which is perfect for your scenario. Hardware wise you could do 3x Supermicro 1u rack servers with core i3 CPUs (dual core) and 32GB RAM for perhaps $700 landed in NZ each. Then even something like this:
http://www.trademe.co.nz/computers/servers/servers/auction-510918593.htm

Running Starwind free for your SAN (don't even get a switch, just put in extra NIC on the SAN). That's 4k NZD for hardware and just over 4k NZD for the VMware license.

Post back if your need advice with Supermicro ;)

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