Anyone using VMWare ESXi 3.5?

Hello all, I have been researching VMWare ESX 3.5 and stumbled upon the free version ESXi 3.5.  Is anyone using the free version for virtualization.  We you able to put it on a glorified computer or did you need to put it on an actual server?  Thanks for any information you may have. 

glamontagne:

Hello all, I have been researching VMWare ESX 3.5 and stumbled upon the free version ESXi 3.5.  Is anyone using the free version for virtualization.  We you able to put it on a glorified computer or did you need to put it on an actual server?  Thanks for any information you may have.

I've used it, and it doesn't really matter unless you want the super high end HA (high availability) stuff.  It's basically just a stripped down version of Linux (BusyBox, I believe) and if you ever need to change machines, just cp those images over.  I tend to do it all manually, but I'm sure that they've gotten something automated now.

One of my business partners is VMWare certfied, and I can also float any questions you have by him.  Or I can give you the IRC channel and listserv where we all hang out and you can ask him whatever you want there.

(Also, tsk tsk...why not post this to the free software forum? I am always in need of some discussion fodder, and you'll be glad to know that I resisted the urge to kidnap this post and put it there!)

Thanks for the reply Rog.  This thread does fit much better in the free/ open source forum, I wasn't thinking too clearly during my original post.  I am going to try to install ESXi 3.5 on a beefy computer, since I haven't anything to lose.  They have a really cool tool  for converting VM's and phiysical machines.  I'll be sure to pick your brain if I run into any troubles. 

Thanks,

Well, technically ESX 3.5i says it has a list of compatible hardware and its pretty specific.  I've been using VMware Server 2.0 - that way I can install whatever Linux tools I want on the host (this helps greatly when I want to do backups).  If you want to call VMware for support on either product, I'd rather be able to tell them I'm using VMware Server 2.0 on X hardware instead of ESX 3.5i on unsupported X hardware ;)

Yeah, I noticed they have a pretty limited list of compatible hardware, that is what was bugging me.  I have downloaded both ESXi and VMware server 2.0.  I'll probably try Server 2.0 first and then ESXi on a seperate spare machine.  I like to tinker. 

Thanks for the advice,

I'm running 7 production virtual machines on a single computer with Server 2.0 right now:

• Windows XP Pro session (I use this as a desktop)
• Server 2003 R2 with AD, Exchange and File Sharing
• Server 2003 R2 with Blackberry Enterprise Server
• Server 2003 R2 with SQL 2000
• CentOS 5.2 LAMP stack for SugarCRM Professional
• CentOS 5.2 LAMP stack for a development copy of SugarCRM Professional
• Windows 2000 Pro application machine for running Quickbooks and housing the database for a windows-based operational software (Service CEO which we're replacing with SugarCRM).

I have a couple inactive, but soon to be activated virtual machines as well.

Hardware Specs:

Dell PowerEdge 2950 with Intel Core2 Quad Processor
6GB RAM
4x 250 GB 7.2KRPM Hot Swap SATA drives in RAID 5 with 1 hot spare

I use external USB drives and MozyPro for backup of stuff.

Hi Chris

How many users do you support on this sever configuration for exchange sql and file sharing blackberry etc?

Dave

Good question Dave.  Scope can help paint a better picture.

• XP Pro and 2000 Pro workstations only support 1 user each (obviously)
• AD, Exchange, File Sharing is for 7 concurrent users
• Blackberry Enterprise only supports 1 user right now (but the Exchange server supports 4 other mobile PDA phones)
• SQL Server isn't running applications - its just for reporting.  We don't use it every day
• CentOS for SugarProfessional is at 2 users, but will be at 7
• CentOS for development will be maybe 2, idle mostly

I can publish the performance stats if you all are interested in that.  Well, I can see if I can get them.  It might just be a screen shot from the Windows client (web page client doesn't give that data).

I would have been allot more excited if that was 70 concurrent users on exchange 4 on the blackberry server and so forth.  For your application it sure sounds like a great deal since you can run multiple servers on one piece of iron as it would be hard to justify the Blackberry hardware costs for one user.

How does the VMware concept work if one of your virtual servers is a backup server using SCSI tape devices.  It seems that every once and a while the backup server will quit talking to the SCSI bus and you have to reboot the server to get your backup device back. Virtualization would be a neat way to split your backup server off of your production server, it when you reboot your virtual server it would reinitialize the SCSI bus for the tape drive.

Dave

Dave, I have a similar setup with a test system - currently at only 2GB of RAM but the rest is almost the same.  I'm willing to put up some systems there for stress testing if you want to help me hammer at it.  The trouble I have is getting enough people together to do a good stress test.  I'd be happy to run a Samba domain, Zimbra mail server (or Sun Java Collaboration Suite), file sharing, and other systems that we can think of.  The problem being, again, enough people to really push the envelope.  I have a very good edge firewall/UTM system that gives me unlimited VPN connections too.

I'm also willing to stress test Microsoft products in there, but I don't have all the licenses for that many people.  I have a 5-user SBS 2003 Standard license I'm not using, but no extra CALs.

As for your SCSI ponderings, I'm really not sure.  I don't know how it will perform when you reboot the backup virtual machine.  I speculate that it depends on where the SCSI bus hangs, in the guest or the host OS.  If its hosed in the host OS, then you're at a bigger loss because it will effect all of your guest systems.  For backup, I'm using mostly rsync for data.  Since all my production machines are virtual, I run weekly scripts to shut down critical services (like MS Exchange or MS SQL) then backup the virtual machine files to external hard drive.  Then I resume the virtual machine.  Using LZO compression on the backup keeps the tar.lzo files small without sacrificing much speed (it's almost real-time compression and almost as good as default gzip).

So, rsync with hard links (every hour) and MozyPro (5 times daily) for data file backups.  Weekly system images.  I feel pretty secure with all the redundancy in my host server (RAID 5 + HotSpare, redundant power supply, 2 different UPS).  If I need to bring a system back up from backup, I can copy the virtual machine files to any virtual host, regardless of its hardware configuration, and then restore data backups from either the rsync or MozyPro.

What is your host os that you are running Server 2.0 under?

CentOS.   [ Here's a good article on how to install VMware Server 2.0 on CentOS 5 ] - its what I used to get started.  Some things have changed, like the version of CentOS is now 5.3, VMware Server 2.0 is no longer in beta, and I think webmin is at version 1.4.7 or something of that nature.  So some of the downloads you'll be doing are slightly different, but the rest of the method is the same.  Let me know if you need any help following the article.

A list of systems, motherboards and SATA controllers that have been tested and found to work with ESX 3.5 or ESXi 3.5

 http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3.5/Whiteboxes_SATA_Controllers_for_ESX_3.5_3i.htm

I spotted an old desktop pc that I had in my garage on the list and after some extra ram and bigger sata drive now runs several VMs no problem at all .

Thought I'd give everyone an update on my VMware Server 2.0 setup.  So, we have 7.2K RPM SATA II drives in RAID-5 (3 drives, 1 hot spare).  I am running into performance issues, mostly disk-based.  In the past, I'd always opted for RAID 5 with a hot spare for redundancy + capacity.  Since storage is "cheap" I'm now considering RAID10 to get extra disk performance, even though I would have to buy more disks.  Also, I'd recommend at least 10K RPM SAS drives - 15K RPM if you can afford them.

I use a 64-bit install of CentOS so that I can take advantage of more RAM.  However, the new 64-bit ESXi 4 (the free one) is looking mighty fine.  I installed it on my test box.  Warning, with no VMs even copied to the datastore on this installation, the hypervisor is using 650 MB RAM...  so pump as much RAM as you possibly can into a ESXi 4 installation - processors too - i.e. opt for more cores at a slightly slower speed instead of fewer cores at a higher speed.  It allows for up to 4 virtual processors instead of only 2 like VMware server.  It's also supposed to work faster with the hardware as they thinned out the overhead for guest to host hardware communication.  So I'm hoping I'll get a performance boost on my production system if I switch to this.  In order to do that, though, I'm going to have to develop a new backup scheme (I was using the Linux host OS to backup the virtual machine files).  I'll let you know.

I've enjoyed reading through this post tonight.  Just finished my vcp on vsphere 2 days ago.  The only config issues you are going to have are the ones you noticed with your hd's.  7200 is a no-no, expecially spread over 3-4 drives.  I don't have the link on me but check out some studies on I/O ability over a 4 disk raid 5.  The other thing not mentioned in this post is the NIC cards.  Those are typically an obvious gigabit, the more the merrier.        In regards to the original post about putting VMWare on a beefed up box, remember that memory is ALWAYS your bottleneck so consider that when your beefin' and I would NEVER trust a single drive to production boxes.  Imagine the I/O nightmare that disk would go though if it had two vm's that it was trying to serv.  Cheers