Re: [PLUG] vmware latest

["Lee H. Marzke" <lee@marzke.net>]

Ron,

My PLUG presentation about ESXi is on my site  http://plone.4aero.com/
along with other things like a review of the Thecus NAS storage box.

Both ESX and ESXi run VMware kernels ( not Linux ).   ESX boots initially
from Linux and has it's 1st VM running linux as a console, but all virtualization
is done by the VMware kernel.   ESXi completely removes Linux,  so only the
core VMware kernel is there -  and the Linux functionality is moved out to
an external free VM ( called Virtual Management Assistant - VMA )

The resulting ESXi image is less than 1GB,  but a 4GB flash is required for
boot media ( rundant ESXi images are stored ).  Normally ESXi 5.0 is booted from a SD flash socket located on the motherboard inside newer HP servers,  so no hard disks are required,  just your NFS or SAN storage.   See the note below,  if you using this as a learning lab do not invest in local disk storage - you need at least an inexpensive NFS or iSCSI SAN storage external to the hosts.

Note: FYI
I've been interviewing a lot of folks recently at one of my Philly clients for a VMware heavy infrastructure position.  A lot of folks claim that they are VMware experts and have no idea how Enterprise features like Vmotion, High-Avialibilty (HA),  Distributed Resource Management (DRS), vCenter server,  iSCSI SAN's ,etc work. and fail the interview out of the gate.

If someone is looking to get VMware experience for job experience the good news is that all these Enterprise features run for 60 days without a license, so you would just need two capable ESXi hosts for a home lab, an NFS server (Linux or something like the Thecus NAS),  and vCenter server can run as a guest VM on one of the hosts.

Lee



----- Original Message -----
> From: "Michael Leone" <turgon@mike-leone.com>
> To: "Philadelphia Linux User's Group Discussion List" <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>
> Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2012 2:55:41 PM
> Subject: Re: [PLUG] vmware latest
> 
> ESX server is EOL, last version was 4.1 Update .. 2, I think. ESX
> server will no longer be upgraded, but is still supported.
> 
> The latest is ESXi 5 Update 1. And vCenter 5.
> 
> On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 2:49 PM, Ron Kaye Jr <rekaye1005@verizon.net>
> wrote:
> > Âtrying to get back to speed with vmware
> > whats the latest version of esx server and vcenter
> > i think we had esx server 3 and vcenter 3/4 at the uphs datacenter
> > several years ago
> >
> > refresh my memory
> > whats the difference between esx and esxi
> 
> ESXi is not based on Linux (in the sense that it's a normal Linux
> that
> just happen to run VMware services). There are also many changes in
> the format of the VMFS, such as sub-block allocation, more
> capabilities for the VMs, and a whole bunch more. It's all listed
> somewhere on VMware's site.
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-- 
"Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion..." - Kryptos 

Lee Marzke, lee@marzke.net http://marzke.net/lee/ 



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