We see the growth in the market to be more aggressive for consolidation in the data center for both physical and virtual server from time to time. There are plenty of solutions in place allow blade to support virtualization today such as virtual connect from HP, pass through module, infiniband integration Xsigo, Cisco UCS and etc. This had significant resolved the I/O interfaces require per blade to host the virtualization host server. CPU and memory per blade and significant increase with the latest release from all the major server vendors, the CPU, memory and disk I/O are no longer the concerns for virutalization.
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I am currently doing some test to simulate the real update requirement for my production VMware Farm to be upgraded from ESX 3.5 to vSphere 4. To minimize the impact to our production system, we may want to do this with as minimal impact as possible. Due to the virtual hardware version and tools upgrade require, is pretty tough for us to perform the entire upgrade at 1 time. Therefore, our plan is get the host upgraded and follow by each individual virtual machine to be upgraded follow the suitable timing for different business unit. HA and DRS will need to be disable temp during the ESX upgrade.
I am able to get the ESX 3.5 to be manage by the latest vcenter. A vmotion from ESX 3.5 to vsphere 4 had been successes too, but the latest version of virtual machine which built from vSphere 4 might not compatible to vmotion back to the ESX 3.5 hosts. At the same time, if you have different processors chipset in the environment and require EVC to be turned on, it may be a little challenge to do so. You may want to ensure the EVC to be done with no down time. You may need to refer to my previous post about how to enable EVC with no down time.
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I just read an interesting article and wat the demo video for the products of Stor Magic SvSAN which is capable to provide the flexibility for us to utilize the local Hard drive in our machine to act as a share storage. As we know, the 1TB SAS HDD is available in the market today, and most of the ESX servers we have today, are not running with local storages due to the requirement of HA, DRS and VMotion within ESX servers. In the video, it show the flexibility and opportunities to fully utilize the ESX servers we have. I am interesting into this particular products and idea and downloading for a try now.
More review will be publish after my test on this. If the success of this products is true, we should able to save some money for some of the cases which may not require big SAN box to their environment to entitle the HA, DRS and Vmotion features. Stay tune.
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Here is some explanation from VMware regarding the different module been offered on the ESX 3i from VMware.
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When I try to log in to my virtual center to verify my VM farm today, the virtual center show my ESX host had been disconnected from the virtual center by itself. The ESX host itself should be running in critical mode as production and had HA and DRS enable on the cluster. The 1st thing I try to verify is to ensure all my VM and the ESX host is still in production mode, and yes, all the VM is not been down and it still run as normal while it disconnected.
Here is what I did to reconfigure my ESX host and re-join it back to the HA and DRS cluster in my production farm.
Disable the HA and DRS features from the cluster, and totally remove the ESX host from the inventory on Virtual Center server. Follow by that, I SSH in to the ESX host with su -, then I path to the /etc/init.d and look for the services mgmt-VMware status command
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