ESX Hardware considerations 2

[ilpadrino]

Hi, can any give some general advice from experience with purchasing hardware to suit ESX? I'm not asking for pricing, but what is a very cost-effective strategy? I'd like to do VMotion for failover, so I'm thinking 3-5 VMs per host, with the failover capability. Should I be considering 2-way servers with 12GB memory, or 4-way servers? Are there any brands you've had success with besides HP and IBM?

Thanks.

 

[comtec17]

This all depends on what is going onto the VM's.

Typically I see 2-way and 4-way servers with 6 - 8 GB RAM.

Since you want to use VMMotion, a shared storage environment such as a SAN will be needed.

 

[ilpadrino]

File Servers, database servers, web servers, domain controllers.

 

[ilpadrino]

I'll add some more thoughts to bump this once, but this forum may not be active enough yet for ESX...

Suppose I purchase 3 host servers. Then I put 4 VMs on each. If one host goes down, I can move 2 VMs each to the remaining active hosts, providing a level or redundancy. Do you think this would exceed the capacity of a 2-way with 12 GB RAM?

 

[Chacalinc]

Do you think this would exceed the capacity of a 2-way with 12 GB RAM?

The problem here is that you are not providing the correct information. What will be the size of your VMs? it will exceed the capacity if you are using the 100% of the resources with the 4 VMs.

Chacal, Inc.

 

[jketron]

I would suggest starting with at least two DL585 with 32GB of RAM. You will of course need a SANS to support Vmotion. A MSA1000 will work very well if you need to start small. Make sure to read all the design best practices when choosing your HBA and NIC and of course make sure they are on the hardware list.

 

[SgtBeavis]

An extra note is that if the ESX server goes down, you won't be using VMotion. You'll need to copy the config files for each VM to the other ESX server and re-register the VM on the target ESX server. So be sure to backup your config files to a LUN so they'll be there if something goes wrong. Remember, VMotion only works if BOTH ESX servers are up and running.

Microsoft Certified Nut.

 

[alexymar]

You should be OK - the normal consolidation ratio (ie number of VM's on a physical ESX server) you should be looking for on a 2-Way server is about 7 to 1 when talking about File/Web/Domain

The reality is you will probably run out of memory before your run out of processing horse power. The thing you may want to check is the database servers and what current utilization they are running at before looking to stick them in a VM....