Hi All,

We have now taken delivery of our shiney new M1000e and was wondering if anyone out there had set these up with ESX3.5. We have purchased 4 x M6220 switches and hoping to get the leads to allow stacking them.

We VMware you are recommended to use different physical NIC's for the Virtual Machines, the service console and the VMotion interface. But, this configuration doesn't really allow for resilience when you have 4 nics.

With the 1955 chassis we were even more limited to only having 2 NIC's. in this case we created one vSwitch, added all the vmotion, service console and VM to the vSwitch and assigned both physical adaptors to this. The virtual switch did some very basic load balancing across the pNIC's and we had a solution. Then from the dell switch we configured the nofification of uplink failure and used etherchannel to team to uplinks to our Cisco core switch

The big question is how do we now reliably configure the system for both performance and reliability when we have more options and i was wondering what configurations people have used?

Thanks in advance

Hywel

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Hello,
I'm an administrator of a small office.
We have about 20 users.
And have the following HW:

Dell PE2900(Domain Contoller,Exchange,SQL2000):
-Microsoft Small Business Server R2 2003 Std.
-1x Xeon Quad Core E5320 1,86Ghz
-4GB Memory
-8x 73GB SAS 15K rpm (Raid 5)
-Intel 10 Gigabit XF SR Server Adapter (Uplink to Switch)
-Quantum LTO2 Tape Drive 200/400gb

Custom Build(Terminal Server):
-Microsoft Windows Server R2 2003 Std.
-1x Intel Core2Duo 6400 2.13Ghz
-4GB Memory
-1x 250GB
-Intel Gigabit VT Quad Port Server Adapter

Switch: Dell PowerConnect 6248

We have 1 other old server wich wil eventually be removed.
And 2 (Pentium 2) workstations for the control of the airco and an RFID Door Access System.

The Terminal Server is basically a workstation with extra memory.
We have 2 types of users: Sales (all the sales employees have a laptop) and internal (own pc or thin-client)

15 Internal
5 Sales
-----+
Total of ±20 users

We want to get all internal users to the terminal server(s)
The sales users also occasionally log in the terminal server when they are working from home.

I think it best to have 2 terminal servers for fallback or for maintenance.

I would like to buy 1 new server and upgrade the PE2900 with more memory ±16gb
And use ESXi 3.5 on both servers to virtualise:
1x Small Business 2003 Std (exchange,domain controller)
2x Windows 2003/2008 Std (Terminal Servers)
2x Windows XP (Airco, Door Access)
1x Windows 2000 Server (Old Server app)
and maybe a Windows 2003/2008 Server with SQL 2005

What is the best way to store the Virtual machines?
Use the internal harddisks or a separate SAN,NAS or NFS server?

We don't have a big budget so i must be creative.

Thanks!!

Gr. Stephan

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Hi, I was notified of this post on the VMware site this morning and thought you guys might be interested. I figured if anyone had advice on configuring a Dell storage array for virtualized database disaster recovery solution it would likely be you guys. http://communities.vmware.com/thread/167318

-Enjoy,

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I did some research and found that the 6950 is not on the offical Hardware support list for ESXi, meaning that it has not been certified. However, the R900 and R905 are on the list which are both 4-socket servers. So ESXi will run on 4-socket servers and does not appear to be socket limited.

Thanks - Todd

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That link didn't work for me. This one did -- http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/software/eslvmwre/EN/VES_3i/Systems%20Management%20Document/PDF/MSMPA01.pdf

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Hey guys,

missed this one. Any chance of a log being posted?


thanks,

Chris Capdevila

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I hope that your bloggers find this Virtualization Spanish blog interesting and that "este blog ayude a mejorar tu Español y a tus lectores"

much appreciated.
rgds,
J.

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During the chat Kristoffer had a couple of questions around the MD3000i. One of which was how do you monitor the performance from a Linux system? I checked with a good Linux friend of mine and he recommends the sysstat package (or RPM) which includes iostat.

Anybody else have a recommendation?

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All of the sudden I'm having problems with connecting to the internet using my Dell Dimension 3000 through Cicsco Linksys Cable Gateway. In network shows that I'm connected by get DNS Server not found when try to go into Internet Explorer. I have checked cables, replaced network adapter still have problems. Any help would be great.

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I have the following 3 x dell 2950 running exs 3.5, These run 5 VMWARE virtual machines "call these vm1-5".All the machines exist on a VDisk created on an MD3000i.The md3000i is split into 3 vdisks , 1 for the Virtual machine env (vmenv), 1 for application data "appdata" ie exchange 2007 and the 3rd for office data."offdata"

I created the host groups for each of my data areas and created and linked the relevant Vdisks. I installed the relevant initiator software onto Vm1-5 , I then attached the appdata vdisk to VM1. No problems so far Vm1 can see and write to Vdisk appdata..all hosted in a virtual Vmware env Great It all goes pearshape from now on.I now want to attach as a shared host vdisk appdata to VM2 "this being the main application server. Iscsi initiator loaded, Disk identified and new local disk e: appears Super.However any data changes to this disk are not reflected on the the other shared host of this Vdisk this being VM1...similarly any data changes from VM1 to appdata are not seen on the dir ouput from VM2.......So i rebooted both vmservers..on restart both had lost the attached vdisk's...both machines reported the disks as offline.,,,I activated the disks on both machines and checked the data.the disks on both machines now only show the data that was originally reported by vm1 ie all data added,changed etc from VM2 is missing..Almost as if each disk is creating and reporting its own MBR and on reboot picks up the MBR record with the latest timestamp.So my question is am I correct in thinking that shared hosted disks means that two machines can share the same vdisk seen by the vm machine as a local disk and live updates should be apparent across the board..if so i have a config problem and need some help finding it. or Have I totally misunderstood the concept and Vmware and MD3000i does not support the sharing of a vdisk as one volume to be seen by two machines as the same local disk.

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