VMware ESXi with MD3000i

Hello All,

I have three Dell blader servers each with 32Gb of RAM , 2 4core processor , 4 NIC's and MD3000i SAN with 14-->300GB SAS drive. No money left in the pot to buy ESX so i have plan to go with ESXi. Any advice?

You can afford a 3000i, 96GB of RAM but not ESX? Well as you have 3 rather capable servers and shared storage you really will want VMotion and virtualcenter to get the most out of it. Is all of that on the ESXi HCL?

The purchase of the Servers are done by previous network manger without planning the cost for VMWare licence which is coming up 2 £8000-10000. Yap all in ESXi HCL.

Could you sell a server and cover part of the cost? I would have thought you could have got £5k that way. Put the management into the further plans? Can't you TCO calculator show that you can save loads of money. What is the I/O like on those SAN any way?

Hi All,

you can try the following deployment plan like mine, it is quite good for DB and Application server since the iSCSI SAN is running on 15k rpm SAS disk insidethe MD 3000i.

hope that helps.

Albert - why on earth the 4 x 500GB drives in each ESX host?

Butuz

ESXi can boot off USB, might be worthwhile unless you plan to utilise local storage on the ESXi servers.

I dont know your SAN specifically but I'd think about going via the switch for the SAN too, your diagram has direct connect. Using another switch if possible, but vlan'd at the least.

More IP work: Storage networks will need additional ESXi service consoles (and IPs for them)
Consider putting the two SAN service consoles on seperate subnets/vlan.
VMnetwork production traffic should be on a seperate subnet/vlan from your main service console.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Butuz

Albert - why on earth the 4 x 500GB drives in each ESX host?

Butuz

---

well it was the built in drive that comes with the old Power Edge 2950-III servers though, I thought that I'd just use it for template store. Any other idea is welcome too :-)