Few general questions about VMWare

[Elvar]

My company is about to buy its first production run virtual machine and are thinking more in the line of vmware and not virtual pc/server.

We will be running on a single processor hp server, upgradable to dual in the future. The plan is to run one production 2003 web server on one virtual machine, another development virtual server, basicly the same setup as the production one. And then possibly in the future add another machine to run another web server.

So the questions are.

Is the GSX server needed for such a small setup or could vmware workstation do the job?

If I go with the vmware workstation setup can I move the image files into a gsx server if the time comes in the future?


The webservers will be running mssql as well. The hardware will be one raid 1 for OS and one raid 5 for data. How will that work when you have a virtual machine with one image file on one disk? mssql is recomeneded for optimal performance to have install one one disk and data files on another.

 

[Chacalinc]

Is the GSX server needed for such a small setup or could vmware workstation do the job?

I always recommend ESX, but GSX will fit in your environment. Workstation is for personal productivity only, and when you change from one server (virtual) to another one, the first one going to freeze.

If I go with the vmware workstation setup can I move the image files into a gsx server if the time comes in the future?

All virutal machines are migrable between all VMWare editions (virtual machines created in workstation can be moved to GSX and ESX).

The webservers will be running mssql as well....

Well, performance depends of your current load and several variables, I can't give you a good response on this one.

Chacal, Inc.

 

[Elvar]

Thanks for the info.

I talked to a local salesrep and right now I think the GSX server will be just what we need for this bit. First real virtual servers here so its a good place to start a test

The main technician was out of the building today so I couldnt ask much of the technical questions I have like the one about mssql.

I dont even know how much load will be on the server since the guy requesting them doesnt know ( he is making some corporate management system for our clients ).

One more question. How does backups work? do I have to do the usual OS backup or can I just take backups of the images? preferably without interupting uptime

 

[Chacalinc]

How does backups work? do I have to do the usual OS backup or can I just take backups of the images?

Both:
- As in any real server, you can install some backup client, as veritas, legato, tivoli, etc. and backup the data as an ussual server... remember: virtual or real, it is still a server with an OS in it.

- As image: the virtual disk for a virtual server is a file, so you can shutdown the virtual server and backup the file (it gonna be an image, hence to restore you gonna restore the whole disk drive, not files!) or take a snapshot (the same thing).

There is a way to mount the virtual disk inside the VMWare, but I know it is possible in ESX server (that's the edition that I know, install and support), may be GSX can do it as well, RTFM.

Cheers.

Chacal, Inc.

 

[johnny99]

As said before.
I would go for ESX and not GSX for productionservers
The cost for a 2 processor licens of ESX only cost a little more then GSX (at least last time I looked and I only have servers with 2 or 4 processors)

Your options on ESX are much better then on GSX, except that ESX doesn't run on just any hardware as do GSX.
But most servers now a days should be fine. At least all the ones I have been checkking out.

One thing that has helped me in my daily life with VMware is VirtualCenter and that also has more options when used to manage ESX servers then on GSX servers

/johnny