Anyone using vSphere for their servers in a school?

[Awx]

Hi all,

 

I work for a large high school and will soon be implementing a virtual server environment. I am favouring Vmware vSphere at the moment and was wondering if there were many other schools out there using vSphere? And, if so, are you happy with it?

 

If anybody is using other hypervisors, ie, Citrix Xen Server or Hyper-V, it would be great to know your opinion of these systems too as I need to do a comparison of all and the pro's and cons of each.

 

Thanks for taking the time to read and your input

 

[Tallwood_6]

Been using vsphere 4.0 for the last 3 years, not had any issues of note. Just make sure your all sorted for backing up the VMs and you get the relevant agents setup for the likes of powerchute, hardware monitoring agents for the hosts etc.

[denon101]

We are using vsphere 5.0 since February, again not had an issue. I have to agree with making sure your backup strategy is good. One thing if you are using vsphere 5.0 we needed an extra physical server to put our LTO 5 drive in as vsphere 5.0 does not work with an internal LTO 5 drive in one of the Esxi hosts. Other than that niggle it has been one of the best investments we have made.

[Gardinho]

We use vsphere 5 and have been doing so for about a year. It has been faultless.

 

You need to be sure how many servers you are ever likely to use. VMware has strange licensing and if you go past 3 physical hosts (or I think they go by physical processor sockets) the cost of the license goes through the roof. You also need good storage (not just large capacity).

 

We run a network of 1600 users, 3 physical hosts (each with 62GB RAM) and 20 odd VMs. The datastore is a 12TB IBM SAN. It runs like a dream. The failover is great. When one server has a problem, all of the VMs transfer live to the other hosts and no downtime is experienced.

 

I carried out extensive research and testing and found that Veeam Backup and Recovery is best when it comes to backing up your virtual estate. I managed to restore an entire 500GB VM in less than 10 minutes.

Edited October 9, 2012 by Gardinho

[mrbios]

Currently got 4 vSphere 5.1 standard hosts with vCenter standard 5.1, very happy with it. Would highly recommend it, the only reason i can imagine anyone would go for something else over vmware is cost, it's certainly the quickest most polished and feature full hyper visor out there. Though obviously the initial cost is quite a big stopping point for a lot of schools, especially if you envisage the need to push higher up the licensing tree.

 

Like the above guy i think i'd recommend veeam for backing them up, personally I'm using backup exec but I'm not overly happy with that (though it does work perfectly for VM backups, it's some other aspects I'm not happy with)

Edited October 9, 2012 by mrbios

[pcstru]

vSphere here and extremely happy with it. We looked at Xen and it wasn't quite as well featured or polished. IMO it's one of those areas where quality is absolutely not negotiable.

[Awx]

Thanks for your responses everyone - much appreciated

 

Our school is looking to gain ICT mark status in the near future. Does anyone else have this status at all as it would be really useful to talk to other techies to get some advice about it.

 

Thanks again

[glennda]

Thanks for your responses everyone - much appreciated

 

Our school is looking to gain ICT mark status in the near future. Does anyone else have this status at all as it would be really useful to talk to other techies to get some advice about it.

 

Thanks again

By ICT Status do you mean specialism? Or like M$ training academy? I thought they scrapped the specialist schools funding?

 

In terms of Virtualization VMware it is the best all round product out in the market place. In comparison to Hyper-V it outshines it in most areas.

 

VMware supports Currently link 670 different OS's whereas Hyper-V is less then 50 (I believe).

 

In terms of the licensing a 3 node cluster (Max 6 Physical CPU's) with a VCenter Server is the essentials package which comes in at circa £410 RRP and VMware vSphere Essentials Bundle includes:

VMFS (Virtual Machine File System)

8-way Virtual SMP

VMware Hypervisor

VMware vStorage Thin Provisioning

VMware Update Manager

VMware vStorage APIs

vMware vCenter Server for Essentials

 

With 5.1 this can have unlimited amounts of RAM (VMware ditched the "Ram Tax" in 5.1).

 

VMware vSphere Essentials Plus Kit is similar in the hardware allowances to the basic essentials package but includes more features but does cost a lot more. @ Circa £5500 RRP including 3 years 24 hour 7 days a week support (or £5100 for 3 years basic).

As well as the features of the essentials package Essentials Plus also includes

VMware vSphere Storage Appliance for Essentials Plus

VMware Data Protection

VMware High Availability (HA)

VMware vMotion

VMware vStorage APIs

VMware Hot Add

VMware vShield Zones

VMware vShield Endpoint

VMware Replication

 

A full edition comparison is available below.

Compare VMware vSphere Kits for Cloud Computing, Server and Data Center Virtualization

 

Remember if you are happy to run 2 x VCenter servers and 2 seperate 3 node clusters there is no reason you cannot run 2 x the Essentials basic kits from what i understand but I will need to check that with the licensing guy - my VTSP only covered technical bits

[Oaktech]

yes... it just works, we set it up with only a cursory glance through the docs. Took us a little while to get the hang of setting the VM's up exactly as we wanted them and the network teaming required some thought but we have 8 vm's running successfully, we are currently manually backing up databases, and snapshotting, but we are literally right now setting up a freeNAS box to back up to via Veeam

[twin--turbo]

At the office...

 

We had ESX3.5 and then Migrated to XenServer.

 

We still have a ESX vSpheer both ESXi and ESX for various things.

 

And I run ESXi 4.x at home for 4 virtual machines.

 

 

ESX vs XEN.... ESX hands Down!!

 

TT

[cpjitservices]

Main server is ESXi latest version with VSphere, the rest of our servers run KVM/Ovirt for virtualization.

[Duke]

Thanks for your responses everyone - much appreciated

 

Our school is looking to gain ICT mark status in the near future. Does anyone else have this status at all as it would be really useful to talk to other techies to get some advice about it.

 

Thanks again

 

We have the ICT Mark status and have been on vSphere for the last four years.

 

Chris

[Paid_Peanuts]

A very happy customer of VMware!

We have been running VMware for 4 + years now using two IBM fibre SAN's with multiple ESX hosts. We have transitioned over the years from ESX3.5 to the latest vSphere ESXi 5 with no issues at all.

[bossman]

@Awx:

 

Been using Xenserver here for the past 4 years with 20 VM's of different OS types, we are now on version 6.0.2 with HA, this has just recently been tested with an incident involving one of the hosts and no-one noticed the difference as the VM's from that host transfered to the other 2 hosts seemlessly.

 

Now we have moved on to this version it also has the feature of scheduling snapshots throughout, from every hour to daily to weekly and all these can be collated and then backed up to a NAS ready to be imported back in if necessary. All this is free so no requirements for backup agents or third party backup software.

 

Obviously it has many more features but this was one of the DRS ones which I thought I would mention.

 

3 Hosts

1 Sun 7110 SAN 4TB carved up into 2 partitions, Raid 5 for fast read and write and Raid 0 for fast read (Hopefully looking to purchase another for failover via mirroring)

1 Hitachi SMS 6TB Data storage

 

Total in cost £16k

[Tall_Paul]

We use vSphere 4.1 here and have done since the school was built in 2009. It's been faultless.

 

Am currently looking at upgrading to 5.1, but will give it another couple of months to let others find any bugs.

 

In terms of backing up I'd thoroughly recommend VEEAM too (with the caveat that it is pretty resource hungry when backing up so you either need a meaty server, or spread VEEAM's components over more than one which is pretty easy to do).

[mrbios]

1 Sun 7110 SAN 4TB carved up into 2 partitions, Raid 5 for fast read and write and Raid 0 for fast read (Hopefully looking to purchase another for failover via mirroring)

 

What are you using RAID0 for? Wouldn't touch RAID0 in any environment other than home personally, the negatives far outweigh the positives.

 

Am currently looking at upgrading to 5.1, but will give it another couple of months to let others find any bugs.

 

One bug that caught me out was a bug with Large Receive Offload that causes VM network traffic to go very slowly when upgrading from 4.x to 5.x, see here to disable LRO if this happens to you: http://docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/Disable_LRO hope that helps, no other issues to mention though

Edited November 20, 2012 by mrbios

[rama1712]

We are just starting dow the vm route and have install esxi and vsphere client and got things working but we thought that these products where free but we are getting 60 days warning when we run Vsphere client.

 

What parts are free to use and what are trial.

What type of price a re we looking at for a 1 physical server with 2 processers 4 cores each 16gb ram. we have the server it just the software.

We are looking at running 3-5 vm mainly smoothwall and moodle vms.

 

THanks in advance

Stuart

[gshaw]

Another VMware shop here, 3 hosts running the Essentials Plus bundle (make sure you get the academic pricing). Currently on 4.1 but will move to 5.1 once all the early bugs are out the way.

 

Backed up with Veeam (they do matching Essentials Plus bundle for 3 hosts) on a physical HP DL180 server. Currently on Veeam v5 but once the vSphere 5.1 upgrade gets done it'll be moved to the new v6.5 release.

 

I prefer VMware to Hyper-V as there's no underlying OS or drivers to worry about and the whole thing fits on an SD card so no need for HDDs in the hosts either. Set it and forget it then enjoy the flexibility of spinning up VMs as and when you want

[cpjitservices]

VMWare here and we had VMWare at a college I worked at, it's nice and easy but can be expensive. Really easy to get VM's up and running and easy to install and configure... However I do use KVM / oVirt on my Virtual Hosts too, when we get new servers we use oVirt or KVM now instead of VMWare.

[Rozzer]

Just migrate from Hyper-V to Vmware and its working pretty well so far I took a stab at setting it up myself and seems to be going ok.

 

+1 for VMWare here

[glennda]

We are just starting dow the vm route and have install esxi and vsphere client and got things working but we thought that these products where free but we are getting 60 days warning when we run Vsphere client.

 

What parts are free to use and what are trial.

What type of price a re we looking at for a 1 physical server with 2 processers 4 cores each 16gb ram. we have the server it just the software.

We are looking at running 3-5 vm mainly smoothwall and moodle vms.

 

THanks in advance

Stuart

 

if you are running stand alone the only thing you will miss by using the free version is the ability to use tools such as Veeam (apparently it works just Veeam arn't allowed to support it.) Most of the features lacking in the free version are the HA and stuff to do with distributed storeage. I'll dig out the comparisions tomorrow if you want.

[glennda]

 

I prefer VMware to Hyper-V as there's no underlying OS or drivers to worry about and the whole thing fits on an SD card so no need for HDDs in the hosts either. Set it and forget it then enjoy the flexibility of spinning up VMs as and when you want

 

Not quite true - VMware does rely on drivers (which can be a pita to get working if they are not in the main release). But with it being based around linux the drives tend to work about 9 million times better then windows (ok slight exaggeration).

 

In all the ESXI installs I've done the only HP hardware I've had a problem with is an ML350 Gen8. But VMware have a release with Specific HP drivers to get the machine running.

[glennda]

3 Hosts

1 Sun 7110 SAN 4TB carved up into 2 partitions, Raid 5 for fast read and write and Raid 0 for fast read (Hopefully looking to purchase another for failover via mirroring)

1 Hitachi SMS 6TB Data storage

 

Total in cost £16k

 

For the cost of getting a second (and considering your primary san might be showing age) You could probably get two devices running Open-E and have Active-Active ISCSI failover from one to the other. Meaning you can completely take a San offline and nobody will notice. Plus there is no size limit. If you want you could use the 36 bay supermicro chassis

[ozydave]

Another vote for VMware. Faultless. So much flexibility.

And another vote for veeam

[bossman]

What are you using RAID0 for?

 

Web server, Media Streaming etc etc where fast read is required and no writeback needed.

 

Wouldn't touch RAID0 in any environment other than home personally, the negatives far outweigh the positives.

 

which negatives? and which positives? are you talking about please explain?

 

Please don't make statements when you don't back them up with information regarding what you are talking about.

 

You may have had issues with Raid0 but have been using it for the past 11 years for the likes of above and have not met with any problems as long as we have a good VM backup its not a problem and as I have stated when we get another SAN to replicate in a mirror we should have total failsafe.

 

We as a middle sized secondary school cannot afford to lash out vast finances on HW so we have to do the best we can with what we have and I think I have fulfilled that criteris to date.

 

Only had 5 hours of non managed downtime in 11 years which I feel is not bad for a system which over the years TOC has been less than £250,000 and still going strong.

 

I would love to spend £100,000 per annum, lucky if I get £15,000 to run all the school systems and toners come out of this for all the ICTsuites.

 

It has been a labour of love and as this is my first and probably my last job in IT within the educational system I feel I have given the students the very best value for the money I have been given.

Edited November 20, 2012 by bossman