Re: [PLUG] VMWare Control

From: "Art Alexion" <art.alexion@gmail.com>
To: "Philadelphia Linux User's Group Discussion List" <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 5, 2011 8:43:47 PM
Subject: Re: [PLUG] VMWare Control

On Jul 5, 2011 7:05 PM, "jeff" <jeffv@op.net> wrote:
>
> On 07/05/2011 06:50 PM, Mike Leone wrote:
>>
>> On 7/5/2011 6:43 PM, Doug Stewart wrote:
>>>
>>> Vcenter requires ESX if I recall correctly. It's the control app for LARGE VMw installs.
>>
>>
>> vCenter is the controller app.
>
>
> and a real pig, whether running two or two hundred machines.
>
> There are some less mature and less piggy apps but I have to find my notes. Nothing as robust, though.

vCenter loads slowly, but runs quickly enough. It should be on a server running nothing else. I think there is only a Windows version, though ESX / ESXi is bare bones Linux.

Actually ESXi is mostly a custom VMware kernel, and the Linux service console has been removed. The version with
Linux included ( ESX ) is no longer being released. This shrinks the hypervisor so much that it is essentially an 'appliance'
and all patches are cumulative ( e.g. you just apply the latest patch and you are done ).

See my VMware users group talk on ESXi here:
http://plone.4aero.com/Members/lmarzke/vmug_esxi/moving-to-esxi-introduction/presentation_view

I echo Michael. Don't run it in a VM. Otherwise, how do you bring up your environment if your controller is down as well.

Running VCenter server on your ESX array is no problem
and in fact about 50% of the users at the recent VMware users conference are doing it this way.

The advantages are that you now have High Availabilty (HA), and can snapshot the VM, and/or
VMotion it to other hosts. If the array was down , just connect the client into the ESX host instead
and startup Vcenter, then connect the client to Vcenter.

It is very mature application and does far more than control VMs. Hosts, clusters, storage, etc.

The new Vsphere 4.1 release of Vcenter server tracks storage statistics, and can even limit storage I/Os
per VM with supported SAN's so that one VM can't hog IO resources.

With all this tracking, the VCenter server now requires (2) cpu and 64bit Windows and about 4GB RAM, but
given those resources it works pretty well after starting up.

Lee