[clue] VMWare question (and VMware Server EOL)

[Jim Ockers]

adam bultman wrote:
> 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 ESX server boots from whatever it wants, of course.

We find it's most convenient for VMs to boot from a "startup disk" which 
is located on a VMware datastore and is typically a VMDK. Yes there are 
lots of other alternatives, but what I was getting at is that it is most 
convenient for VMs to boot from a VMDK on a VMFS datastore.
>> 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 guess you know a lot more about this than I do. One thing I noticed is 
that in our environment we have 5 different networks (IP address ranges) 
and our ESX servers participate in those (so that VMs have access to 
them). When moving VMs I find I have to re-choose the VM Network from 
the connections picklist because they may be in different orders and 
have different network names between different servers. I guess if you 
have vMotion then you have to have the discipline to cable each ESX 
server the same and also name the networks the same on each ESX host? I 
was wondering how you make sure the network connections work the same 
from one ESX server to another.
> 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.
>   
-- 
Jim Ockers, P.E., P.Eng. (ockers at ockers.net)
Contact info: http://www.ockers.net/


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