Tell Me About vSphere

swain90 · 19 Mar 2018 at 11:43

Hi All,

As part of a large company IT migration I've found myself possibly needing some new hardware which would maintained by myself and a few others from a different department. This kit will be mainly used for Lab purposes and probably 1 or two VMs to be used for business purposes.

I'm in the middle of weighing up the options in terms of what virtualisation software to go for.

I'm currently swayed to go for VMware vSphere Hypervisor 6.5 as we don't need the host to do anything other than virtualise and plus it's free!

I've had a read online and it sounds like there's some minor limitations such as 8 vCPUs per VM which is more than enough for our needs. However if there's some other major features I'd be missing it'd be useful to know.

It'd be interesting to know what sort of redundancy people have used in the past for similar setups. I was initially looking at RAID1 for the host hardware.

Any info would be appreciated!

Cheers,

Swain90

blueboy2001 · 19 Mar 2018 at 13:07

The free version of ESXi (aka VMware vSphere Hypervisor 6.5) doesn't allow access to any of the API's. This means you cannot use backup solutions like Veeam to take backups for example. You can get an Essentials kit which gives you licences for 3 hosts for a few hundred quid if you need this.

GDL · 19 Mar 2018 at 13:19

ESXI Free also has no support from VMWare last time I checked.
99% of the time it's unneeded but it's worth it's weight when it is.

Nikumba · 19 Mar 2018 at 16:27

Another option would be to use Hyper-V that is baked into windows server OS

Not sure what criteria you have been looking at thought, but at work we use either HyperV or Xen but then we do not use backup of servers as we run with primary and secondary ones

Buffalo2102 · 19 Mar 2018 at 21:22

oVirt is another free option and Proxmox too.

mrbazmondo · 19 Mar 2018 at 22:07

You normally set up clusters of 2 or more ESXi with shared storage so you have host redundancy, and the VMs can run on either host. You can't do that with the free version.

mrbazmondo · 19 Mar 2018 at 23:25

Thinking about it, you probably can, you just can't live migrate or automate migration as you can't call the APIs t do so without a license.

Caged · 20 Mar 2018 at 00:28

Just buy an essentials license. If you're new to all this and are running things for business purposes on it then it's good to have the support available.

swain90 · 20 Mar 2018 at 07:38

Thanks for the comments, I'm going to have a play today with setting up some VMs and looking at what backup options to see if they provide what we need.

@Nikumba we're currently using Hyper-V for some other VMs and while it does its job, I'm not the biggest fan.

LizardKing · 20 Mar 2018 at 11:51

If your already licensing the host for server 2016 then i'd go HyperV, Vsphere essentials is ok but the feature set compared to hyper v is lacking significantly these days unless you opt for Essentials plus which is considerably more expensive and even then still lacks.
If i was to rebuild our estate tomorrow i'd go HyperV for sure these days, 5 years ago i'd never dream of thinking that :eek:

mrbazmondo · 20 Mar 2018 at 12:03

Hyper-V makes sense if you've already paid for it, which is why MS put it in there so it doesn't make sense to spend extra money on a hypervisor from a competitor.
KVM is another solution. It may be free, but its a lot of work if you don't pay for good management.
VMware are the incumbent, but the price is making people look else where.

Hellsmk2 · 23 Mar 2018 at 18:12

Just on the minor limitation you mentioned.... 8 is a huge amount in virtualization. Most of your vm's will need 1-2 cpus max.

Have a read up on CPU stress and contention to cement why. Most folk dipping their toes into virtualisation do make the mistake of thinking more virtual resource equals more performance, which is not at all the case.