laser402

Set core to 0 and leave rest as default (32768). I have primary core at 0 and my redundant secondary core at 4096.

All hardware will come with a 3 year warranty apparently But I agree that the specs are far too restrictive, especially if you are committed to buy at a random price point

Agreed, we went for the essentials plus for 3 hosts, bought 3 Dell R710's with Dual quad core processors, 48GB Memory each. Running around 14 virtual machines between them. I see no need for more hosts. Memory will be the issue which we can easily upgrade.

"The vCenter for Essentials only supports 3 Hosts so no you can't add a 4th host to the vCenter for Essentials, worse still is that the 3 host licences you get with it can't work with a regular vCenter (Standard) later either - so you'd really limited if you go this way. I'd strongly advise going for one of the Standard or Advanced Acceleration Kits, they're more expensive today but don't limit you in the future." Stolen from licensing - From vSphere Essentials Plus Kit to 4 hosts - Server Fault

Year of Admission (2006 = 06) + First name + last name (In Caps to make it easier to distinguish) Students keep this throughout their school life. We do not normally get duplicates as the names would have to be identical per year. e.g. 2006 Pupil would be 06FredPERRY.

Just to let you all know, Update to version 10.50.14 (were on 10.50.0) seemed to solve it, providing its on screenscrape. Netsupport website still seems to show it still as 10.50 though. Thanks to Netsupport's support!

Any one got this working smoothly? Ive tried the work around found here Problem is the refresh rate of viewing the client screen is awful. Regards Mark

When you say its coped (just!) Do you mean performance wise or was it more a capacity/storage issue? I assume the 7120's are little more beefy? Our Support Guy also said about leaning away from SD Cards to run ESXi on. He said in his experience it causes the Hypervisor to run slowly compared to HDDs. Dell supply a 1GB SD Card with the R710 for this very purpose... Does anyone has anyone has any issues like this before?

Ok, In our latest meeting we have looked at alternate ways of doing things, The problem is our File Server. All of this virtualization/HA/Redundancy will be in vain if this thing fails. We have come to the conclusion that using a SAN (or 2 replicated) with direct CIFS shares may be the best way. Sun S7120 12TB isnt looking too bad now! Although would it handle 800 machines using it for File storage + the VM's over iSCSI/NFS, with 8 GbE ports? Decisions, Decisions....

That sounds promising for the virtual machines however the PS4000's will be doing replication over the same link? (I assume its real time replication?) Still, Ill get them to convince me when they demo it.

I would hope the RAID10 was Striped Mirrors (Better Performance Boost) Has anyone used RAID50? Could help me squeeze some extra storage in for the budget! Dell are coming to do a Equallogic Demo. From what ive read the controllers are always in Active/Passive mode, never Active/Active, So the talk about 16 disks being too much for one controller must be aload of rubbish! Im still not sure about the lack of GbE ports.... How is your Sun S7000 doing Network wise Duke? What are your peaks etc.

I will have to look up some disk IO specs for the controllers, havent looked too much into all of our current usages as I cant imagine its anything big. Current Setups: SQL (SIMS) Database: 2 Disk 10K SCSI 320 RAID1 Array. Exchange Staff: 3 Disk RAID5 15K SAS Array. Exchange Student: 2 Disk 10K SCSI 320 RAID1 Array. File Server will be kept seperate from all of this as it is brand new and will not be virtualized. Putting all of this onto a new RAID10 10/15K 12/16 Disk Array should easily be sufficient?

Currently in talks with different people about different products. Dell are giving me some very persuasive pricing on the PS4000X SAN's, Does anyone know if dual controllers is needed with it maxed out with 16 disks? Our account manager seems to think a single controller would struggle with the Disk IO of all 16. Another thing is that these only have 2GbE ports per controller, does this seem limited? The cheaper MD3200i has 4!

Ill be asking for a Quote on that too then

From what I can tell you have lost a major advantage of virtualization, if your physical DC's die, you will have to rebuild them on to seperate hardware. Virtualization could just send them to another Host, keeping your Domain up. Storage Virtualization I could never understand, however I can start to see benifits to that as well. Although just getting a SAN which does CIFS replicated would probably be a nicer way of doing things. Why has Oracle changed from the 7110 with ~4TB of storage at entry level to a SAN with ~12TB of storage? It seems im paying for space I would most likely never use (Our fileserver is brand new and seperate from this project)