ESXi - A perspective from the Microsoft World
I’ve written a bit about ESXi before in a comparison to other free virtualization products from an SMB perspective.
I’ve seen the “big” ESX in a few places and worked a bit with it, but i decided to refresh my knowledge on VMware a bit. For this, i first had to scrounge up a machine that was able to pass the rigorous HCL from VMware.
Unfortunately i didn’t find something that was really a Small Business machine - i used a HS21 Blade from my BladeCenter S testing environment.
The HS21 blade has 4GB RAM, a 2.66 Ghz QuadCore CPU and two 500GB SATA Harddisks attached to an LSI1064 SAS Controller. Fortunately, this configuration is supported.
Installing ESXi
Similar to the installation of Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista, the ESXi installation is extremely streamlined. All you have to do is pop the CD in, select the disk where you want to install ESXi and then let it continue. The whole setup took around 15 minutes, most of the delay owed to the extremely slow Laptop CD Drive installed in the BladeCenter S.
After installation, the Blade rebooted and you will be greeted by an extremely simplistic interface that allows you to change basics like the password of ESXi and reconfigure the management network interface and also display a few logfiles. On first startup, it also showed my a Web address where i can download the VI Client that is used to manage ESXi.
A very pleasant experience.
Installing the VI Client
After accessing the ESXi host through HTTP, i could then download the VI Client. Installation on another Blade running WS2008 was smooth. It also installed an Update Service that allows me to upgrade ESXi.
Configuring ESXi for the first time
After logging on using the VI Client to ESXi, i was greeted with a nicely detailed instructions that i would need to create a datastore. After few clicks i had a datastore created on the RAID1 that ESXi was installed.
The VI Client looks very impressive and neat. It looks like ESXi can read diagnostic information from the Blade, and can monitor RAID, Fan and other stati easily. One of the things i really like about this is that you get a standardized interface for monitoring your hardware - on Windows you usually have to use tools like IBM Director that are just one big mess to handle. Here, i didn’t have to configure anything - it just worked.
After entering licensing information, configurating a static IP Address, changing hostname and DNS information, i rebooted the blade.
Creating the first Virtual Machine
I decided to create a first virtual machine - the blade i killed for running ESXi was previously running Exchange 2007. As this is just a demonstration setup, i decided to recover the preexisting Exchange server into a VM, in order continue having a full featured demo setup.
So i created a new Virtual Machine, configured for running Windows Server 2008 x64. Now, i didn’t have WDS setup in the Demo Environment, so i had to find a way to boot the Blade from an ISO. Previously i used scp to copy the ISO to the ESX Management Partition, but that didn’t work on ESXi. Luckily, the VI Client has a “Datastore Browser” that allowed me to upload files to the vmfs3 filesystem.
After uploading the ISO, i booted from it. The installation was pretty slow, but comparisons to my Hyper-V hosts aren’t fair as those run 10kRPM 147GB SAS Disks in a RAID5 configuration instead of the slow-as-molasses 500GB 7.2kRPM SATA Disks.
After OS installation, i immediately installed the VMware tools. One reboot later, i had a working Windows Server 2008 machine.
One of the things i noticed: When running WS08 virtualized on Hyper-V with 4 virtual CPUs on a Quadcore machine, WS08 thinks i have on Quadcore. On VMware, WS08 thinks i have 4 real CPUs (Sockets). This can bite you if you want to give a WS08 Std Machine more than 4 Cores - as WS08 Std is only licensed to four sockets.
The next step obviously is restoring the Exchange server, but that doesn’t really have to do all that much with ESXi.
Conclusion
ESXi is great. One of the biggest advantages over Hyper-V is the VI Client that consolidates a lot of information that is all strewn about in Windows. For example, it has built-in performance metrics, raid status monitors, etc. You can get all the same information with a machine running Hyper-V, but you’ll have to use other tools for that (of course you can customize a MMC do include Perfmon, but it’s not exactly the same).
VMware shows that they have gained long term experience with Virtual Machines, and the VI Client clearly shows the maturity of their product.
Permission management seems much better than Hyper-V, but i didn’t find a way to use Active Directory integration. Maybe Virtual Center is required to this, or i just wasn’t able to find it in ESXi - it exists, because there are numerous references on the Web.
I’ll certainly consider using Hyper-V when i have to run non-Windows guests. For Windows guests, Hyper-V with it’s VMbus architecture seems better suited. For non-Windows guests, VMware can’t be beaten right now.
eric:
But, this ‘cute’ and very functionnal GUI software, wich can be downloaded from web interface of your new ESXi server, seem to be in trial period for 60 days !!
So, the ESXi server is free, but you have to purchase at high-cost the GUI management tool !
eric,
26. August, 2008, 05:21Lukas Beeler:
eric,
Did you enter the license you get when you click the activation link in the mail you get from VMware?
26. August, 2008, 07:23Joel:
I also thought you had to purchase the VI Client but I finally found where you enter the license code they gave you when you downloaded it. The 60 day thing went away.
26. August, 2008, 17:55Thomas:
In reviewing ESXi I have found 3 issues that will hinder SME adoption:
1. Install is very restrictive and HCL is limiting. There are many ’small’ servers that have the horsepower, but unable to install ESXi on them. E.g. Where is support for SATA RAID, this is a typical out-of-the-box feature on many motherboards, but unable to use it with ESXi.
2. Support for USB … many small shops need USB support. Not supported by ESXi.
3. Backup. We have been ripped-off by backup vendors (software and hardware) for years. Virtualisation is an opportunity to fix this. Please fix it by delivering a solution built into the Virtualisation layer.
Virtualisation is potentially a great way forward, but a little more maturity (better low-end HW support, USB support & Backup) is needed before adoption can be at a mass scale.
1. September, 2008, 10:51Lukas Beeler:
Thomas,
1. I agree that the ESXi HCL could be better, but i don’t see a reason to use cheap onboard SATA RAID Controllers in a production deployment, even in a small business. SAS Drives and their controllers are rather cheap nowadays, and when you’re using virtualization your IO requirements go up, not down. I’ve seen to many people that wanted to run 10 VMs on 2 500GB SATA drives - it just doesn’t work.
2. USB? For what? Why?
3. Agreed.
1. September, 2008, 11:00dennis:
2. USB? - for portability: We constantly move around VM’s over USB drives. Being able to tote around a 40G set of files from one location to another bets the wait of pushing the files over the wire (though VPN). This would help the backup issue as well.
3. September, 2008, 01:22mpss:
Joel, where (how) did you enter license? I’m still looking…
4. September, 2008, 20:20dennis:
mpss, to enter a license number, go to the VI client, Configuration tab, under Software..Licensed Features.
Also, we are looking into using the ‘add storage’ and mounting a NAS (like the Buffalo linkstation) that has a USB port on it… that may be the way to get the portability we need.
4. September, 2008, 20:30Steve T:
I’m in the same boat - trying to get into virtualization on the cheap for my SMB clients. I found that the HP servers with e200 RAID controllers work beautifully. Regarding USB, it sure would be nice if the guest machines could access the hosts’s USB ports. It would be helpful for file transfers and backups. I don’t see it anywhere, I’m assuming it’s not there. VMware server has this, ESXi doesn’t appear to.
9. September, 2008, 22:13dennis:
I don’t think the USB ports are available… We had to ditch the Buffalo linkstation: didn’t realize it has no iSCSI support (out of the box, however I saw some NAS hacks that could add it in…). Now we are playing with a DLink DNS232 which supports iSCSI. However, no success getting that connected either.
10. September, 2008, 19:13Good news in other areas: We have 4 machines running simultaneously and are practicing SQL Server failover and replication techniques. They all balance and feel like they are running bare-wire; no benchmarks to back it up, though.
Steve T:
I’m currently testing a NetGear ReadyNAS duo, which supports NFS 3 (the only version of NFS that ESXi can talk to). It mounts and seems to run OK, though I suspect anything resource intensive on a guest would result in significant latency. I haven’t tried it, but Buffalo offers an iSCSI drive. I can’t really afford the HBA for the server just yet.
11. September, 2008, 16:05Peedy:
Im not sure I agree with the comments about SATA Drives not being sufficient. I recently used ESXi on a Proliant DL320 G5p (unsupported but works fine) to build a test VM of Exchange 2003, and it handled 150 simutaneous users logged in doing things at once using Microsofts LoadSim utility. Server didn’t even flinch. Disk access was low and this was with a VM alloted 1GB of ram. When I put it into production I plan to give it 3GB.
19. November, 2008, 04:56Steve:
As a backup solution for esxi, you should try using Affa. its an opensource package thats free to use on SME Linux distributions. It is a bit of a pain to set up but once you have it workin you can perform “hot backups” of the virtual machine and save copies on network stores. If a machine ever goes down you can use the vmware converter to restore the VM back to whatever esxi server remotely, works great.
links:
http://wiki.contribs.org/Backup_of_ESXi_Virtual_Machines_using_Affa
25. November, 2008, 23:08http://wiki.contribs.org/Affa#Affa_features_at_a_glance
KBuchanan:
Regarding how to do a “hot backup” of ESXi, it is easy, but there are caveats.
First - follow the instructions here: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/164134?tstart=0
The major caveats:
You create a snapshot of the running VM, and then clone the image to a NFS mounted datastore. This does NOT quiesce the system, so beware when doing an imaged-based backup of VMs running databases, Exchange, etc…
You basically have 2 backup options: Image-based backup (see link above), or Agent-based backup. The Agent-based backup has several disadvantages b/c of the load it will place on the host. Here is a good read with the advantages/disadvantages of these backup options: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_35/esx_3/r35/vi3_35_25_vm_backup.pdf
Of course, VMWare touts their VCB Consolidated Backup as the “premium solution” - but you have to puchase a license for it.
We are running ESXi and doing imaged-based backups so we have a “gold-platform”, and running agent-based backups to do data backups. It isn’t ideal, but its the least cost and IT WORKS.
My last suggestion - do plenty of testing and verify you have a valid DR plan. Virtualizing servers is easy work…an idiot can do it (no lack of supply there). However, it takes an intelligent and well-informed person to understand the principles to properly size the host hardware and create a workable backup solution.
4. January, 2009, 00:33