andrew-virtusolve

You can't open them in the same single window as your vCenter view, by design you need to open them separately, but you can open as many copies of the vsphere client as you like in parallel, means you are restricted to using the windows task bar to flick between them though. The client when initially launched before you connect to a server is just a launcher that then loads the app components depending on what you are connecting to - so a vCenter will open up all the additional vCenter views, connecting to an version 3.5 ESX host will open the older version of the client (2.5). I guess it would be relatively easy to unify views in a similar manner to Remote Desktop Connection Manager by Microsoft for multiple RDP sessions, but there is not that much benefit really. In essence by design you are prevented from having a nice unified view unless you are licensed under vCenter

There is a commercial offering from Citrix XenCLIENT, that is also a Tier 1 hypervisor (bare metal) for the desktop, its very good. Citrix Systems » Desktop virtualization, virtual desktops - Citrix XenClient Even better, the Express version is fully featured and free!

Mo, HP do a dual proc server at a very good price point in the shape of the ML150G6 server, its a quality piece of kit considering it's place in the market and if configured right make perfect entry-level virtual hosts. Most of the schools and colleges we work with buy them, if not there are some decent Dell offerings, but no dual-processor models that come in at this price-point. Drop me a PM if you need any further info and I will send you a copy of our standard Specification that has all the options on the VMware Hardware Compatibility List - which means it will likely work with Citrix and MS as they are much more flexible in terms of supported hardware config.

Would echo the comments here, almost everything can be virtualised, given the right setup and tuning, we have some customers with VM's running 64GB of RAM using appropriate disk configurations that show equal SQL performance as their physical counterparts, even with the hypervisor overhead. The key is to get your tuning right, as Soulfish rightly points out configuring the VM's right in the first place is the key as with all hypervisors there are limits to how virtual symmetric multiprocessing works so that indeed 1vCPU can sometimes yield quicker results than 4vCPUs on contended hosts. The first thing to do is to select the best possible hypervisor for your needs, lots of people opt for hyper-v as they see it as an easy migration path from physical windows, when I would place it third in my top three hypervisors after ESXi and XenServer, it is right for some use cases, but for most I would go with another offering. The second thing to do is size your target environment based on your current workloads, this can be a simple paper exercise sizing the Virtual Machines based on their current use to a proper survey with Capacity Planner or a third party tool. The third thing to do is to pick your storage and backup strategy, will you go for shared storage, use an existing SAN, pick some cheap iSCSI offerings or just use local disks. Will you leverage hypervisor-aware backups or carry on with your existing agent based backups. It can be as simple or as complex as you need it to be, if you need any help or specific advice, drop me a PM and Good Luck!

Remember in VMware, you don't bind a Virtual NIC to a Physical NIC, you bind a Virtual NIC to a vSwitch - which may or may not connect to a physical network connection in the host

You can have vSwitches configured with no physical connection and maintain a private network within a single host using normal VMware vSwitches, so for access from the outside you will need a physical uplink NIC - which can only connect to ONE vSwitch, but its fine to have a number of other networks where VM's will share traffic on private vLANs that don't have physical uplinks. PM me if you need any assistance

Most likely to be your NIC, ensure your NIC is on the VMware HCL (Link Below) and if you have a specific card then disable any incompatible NIC's in the BIOS. VMware Compatibility Guide - Search the VMware Compatibility Guide If this still doesn't work, or the drivers suggested by somabc, then try disabling any onboard RAID config you have, finally on some HP models the CD Driver is not recongised in 4.1, you can either install from a separate CD-ROM (external) or install 4.0 and perform an upgrade afterwards.

We would recommend Thin Station, and almost any linux over the link below, but it is interesting and may be a more legitimate path when it's released - we are on the beta and it works well: Windows Thin PC by Microsoft | Windows Enterprise

The amount of people who were prepared to pay for Storage Server ;-) Good post, Thanks

Do you have a layer-3 network that you are connecting this to? I notice you have vLAN IDs set on your vSwitch, this is not always an obvious a configuration setting as you think it would be. I would suggest removing the vSwitch and creating a new one WITHOUT the vLAN ID tag set. Also, you should check your Physical NIC is set to active and not standby, click Properties next to the vSwitch, under the Ports tab highlight the vSwitch and click edit, the last tab on that screen is called NIC teaming and should look like this: http://i109.photobucket.com/albums/n45/andybaxta/Shared/sadasdas.png You can move the adapters up and down into the various sections on the right If you are still having trouble, drop me an IM

You are right, ESXi embedded is only available from supported vendors. Nothing to stop you using USB or SD cards as the boot partition for your own installation of ESXi, embedded simply means the vendor builds it with their own drivers included and sometimes some branding, but there is no major difference.

http://www.vmguru.nl/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/VMware-vSphere-SMB-Editions.png http://www.vmguru.nl/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/VMware-vSphere-Editions-300x254.png Hardly any features cut, if you do need beyond three hosts you can get multiple licences but you won't be able to manage them through a single vCenter, not a major issue - but at that stage you are better shifting to full licences. Essentials is a great way to do things in a much cheaper way than otherwise

It depends on a number of things - complexity, your experience, how 'advanced' you want your solution to be. I would say most experienced infrastructure/server admins would be able to accomplish a basic setup with Hyper-V and with a bit more confidence Xen or ESXi. Normally its when you want to do the more complex things such as High Availability or Clustering with storage configs and service console networks to consider. Then there is the migration activities, again most of the time the conversion tools run pretty well. The value a third party will add is experience in the unexpected and avoidance of the typical configuration mistakes made by people on their first time out and help preventing issues in the future. Things such as ensuring the hardware is on the HCL, sizing Virtual Machines correctly - for instance an 8 vCPU machine is almost always slower to perform than a 4 vCPU machine in an ESX environment because of the challenges with vSMP when there are contention at the host layers. A good provider should be able to sell you the services you need whilst allowing you to save money on the less complex parts of the solution and should leave you with the skills to manage and support the environment afterwards. Its horses for courses really, if you don't feel its a complex setup, then go for it - you could always get it health checked afterwards before it all goes 'live'.

VMware Server is free, ESXi is free, workstation is a chargeable product designed for developers without Servers and powerful laptops/desktops Probably easier to go MS Virtual PC (pap) or Virtualbox

You will just not be able to add them into the essentials configuration, but you could run two independant installations with two lots of licensing, Most people are surprised at how cheap it can be done for - VMware are desperate to extend their reach into the environments where people are going Xen or Hyper-V for cost reasons and have been offering a half price deal on essentials for ages. Full details in PDF: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/VMware-vSphere-4-Essentials-Editions-DS-EN.pdf

If price is a constraint go Xen, you get enterprise features for no money. If you want the best possible solution out there go VMware, you can use the free version of ESXi, but if you want more advanced features and hypervisor level backup you will need the paid version. It doesn't have to be hugely expensive though, you can get the Essentials versions that allow for unlimited virtual machines on up to three hosts and up to 6 physical CPUs for less than £500. Hyper-V is just so far behind where VMware are - its an easier jump to make if you are so used to Windows, but an inferior product IMHO

Agree, when you factor in cost with the features provided, they are a great offering. I like the ChipPC solutions as they don't leave anything on the desk to be easily taken away, but you won't go far wrong with the Axel product line

We sell both Veeam and vRanger and have found Veeam to be the most reliable, but vRanger to be far easier to use and work with. vRanger 5.0 is coming out on 17th January which offers a load of new benefits over the previous version and integrates the replication, but Veeam 5.0.1 is a rock solid solution, both have their merits depending on your solution. You will also need to remember that you need the full vStorage API's for either solution, which means you need to have a vCenter server running and licensed before they will function. As a third option you may also want to look at PHDVirtual, but we don't rate it when the other two are around. As for licensing, vRanger is offering a new Essentials product that matches the VMware essentials one (cheap, up to three servers and 6 CPUs covered) VMware are pulling out of offering backup solutions, so you can expect VDR to be dropped (as VCB already has been).