Sunday, October 26, 2008

VMWARE ESXi

Random thoughts & notes about VMWare ESXi:

  • Installation is very straight forward although the installer itself is incredibly slow. It took a good 5-10 minutes to start it and the actual install took maybe 2 minutes at most.
  • VMWare Convertor will let you convert a standard workstation/player VM to Infrastructure and automatically upload it to your ESX server. Nice feature.
  • You can create a datastore to hold all your ISO images of operating systems so setting up new VMs through the Infrastructure client is super easy and quick.
  • Unfortunately most of these tools are Windows or Linux only. I don't think OSX Fusion can interface much, if at all, with ESX.
  • I can't seem to pass through a local drive for the VM to access natively. I think I'm doing something wrong but I'm not really sure. Perhaps it's just not detecting my 3Ware card in which case I'm going to need to build a separate NAS -- which is probably a good idea anyway.
  • The whole datastore concept makes a lot of sense. A big RAID10 setup would probably be ideal for this. Overkill for my personal needs of course but I think we'll end up doing that at work. Perhaps two OpenFiler boxes in HA mode, each with a RAID10.


1 comment:

Deikensentsu said...

ESXi does not allow native access to a local drive by design I believe. It only supports iSCSI/NFS/SAN drives, or a SCSI (SATA) drive formatted with VMFS3. Most enterprise users (more likely to upgrade to ESX) wouldn't utilize a passthrough as that prevents vMotion and introduces a TON of management headaches.