[clue] VMWare question (and VMware Server EOL)

[adam bultman]

On 11/08/2012 09:15 AM, Jim Ockers wrote:
> That said, the VMDKs for startup disks do need to be on a VMFS5 (or
> VMFS3) formatted datastore. The secondary/tertiary disks (which in our
> case are individual iSCSI targets) can be formatted however the guest
> OS wants, because the block device is passed directly through from the
> ESX iSCSI initiator into the guest OS as a plain disk, which it can
> format however it wants.
Huh?  Can you define "startup disk?"  Are you referring to the HDD that
the server and ESXi boots from, or the VM?  VMs can boot from whatever
they want; but ESXi can PXE boot, if you set them up to.

> The workflow for moving a VM between ESX servers manually is pretty
> easy and quick, since all our storage and all VMware datastores are on
> iSCSI targets from an OpenFiler. We haven't invested in the vMotion
> wizzy stuff that lets you migrate VMs without shutting them down,
> because we don't feel we need it at this point. 

vMotion is snazzy.  We have an Enterprise Plus license, and I just
migrated our VMs (280+) from our older, HP blade infrastructure (40+
blades, two locations) to newer Cisco UCS infrastructure (16 blades, two
locations) by simply vmotioning them over.  And host profiles make
provisioning new ESXi hosts a breeze in comparison.

I will say this: The CLI on ESXi is veeeery minimal.  The CLI on ESX was
much more fully featured.  A large amount of my work on our vSphere 4.0
(ESX) hosts was done via the CLI, but with ESXi, I am a lot more limited
there, and am forced to use the gui.  However, there is a toolkit that
lets you use powershell (or perl, I think, too) to issue commands. 
Which is nice.