OSX server VM running on a SAN with Mac Mini as ESXi host

locrieth

locrieth

locrieth

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Hey all, I want to pick your brains.

So we are looking to virtualise our OSX servers (2 x Mac Minis) to give them a bit more resilience and additional functionality. The plan is to have the 2 mac minis as ESXi hosts (standalone Hypervisors, not integrated into our VCentre) and to run 2 OSX servers VMs utilising the resources of the Mac minis (CPU and RAM), but to have the actual VMDK files located on our SAN attached via Iscsi.

so the question is:

Is this legal according to Apples T&Cs?

Cheers,

Locrieth
 
cheers for the response, I agree, but the issue I want to check is that the VMDK files would be located on an iscsi volume on SAN not the local storage on the Mac Minis. is it legal to do that?
 
My view (and mine only) is that the iSCSI volume is like an external hard drive. So long as the hypervisor is running on Apple hardware then where the vmdk is stored shouldn’t matter.
 
Bluecube said:
My view (and mine only) is that the iSCSI volume is like an external hard drive. So long as the hypervisor is running on Apple hardware then where the vmdk is stored shouldn’t matter.
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That's what I'm hoping! Probably need to contact Apple for clarification. We are going out to Tender for a New SAN and my boss has said he wants this done and included in the tender, so I thought better check up on the Legality of it first.
 
What advantage do you get by virtualising them and then running that VM back onto the same hardware (with a hypervisor layer).

Only ones I can think of are decent backup / snapshot / clone and rollback facilities via a SAN that you wouldn't have by leaving the OS on the bare metal boxes.
 
skyripper said:
What advantage do you get by virtualising them and then running that VM back onto the same hardware (with a hypervisor layer).

Only ones I can think of are decent backup / snapshot / clone and rollback facilities via a SAN that you wouldn't have by leaving the OS on the bare metal boxes.
Click to expand...


Basically these reasons. We have a suite of 140 Macs that rely on these servers and we wanted a bit more functionality i.e. resilience / snapshoting etc. The snapshots are then replicated to our other site so we have DR.
 
Use APFS or whatever it's called for your snapshots.

If it's a work environment I would not recommend it because it won't be supported by VMware.
 
iSCSI off a single Gigabit ethernet connection -- that's a MASSIVE step back in performance and reliability. Also, if you are running them standalone, then there's no vMotion anyway, so what's the point of having them on external storage?
 
At present we have 2 additional thunderbolt gig nics attached and teamed on each mac mini, so we would use those. With the vmdks on the SAN it would be relatively quick to readd the VMs to the other mac mini inventory in case of hardware failure.
 
Much much much better to have them on local storage (SSD) with good (that you test e.g. once a month) backups.
 
Buy 2x mac mini's, and image the drives of the live ones to them on a regular basis.
In case of failure, get them out the cupboard and plug them in?
 
I have done this in the past but found them to be a bit ropey.
Security-related services such as iCloud caching server and Profile Manager were the worst and when you are troubleshooting, you never know whether or not it is the host environment or it would happen with OSX on bare metal. The performance wasn't great either - wouldn't like it with file services.
What services are you using OS X Server for?
 
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