Moving to local storage?
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Mostly we use "whatever is cheap" as far as the USB drive goes. No need for much of anything.
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I got the new drives which are sealed genuine HP drives. Never will I buy HP from the "big" vendors again. I'm planning to tackle this project next week. Here's the plan, please let me know if something doesn't make sense or if you think I'm missing the mark.
I have 2 hosts so I plan to move all of my VM's to one host. I believe I can then export the settings from the VMless host. I will then install ESXi on a USB drive connected to the server and import the settings from the old host. At that point I should be able to format all of the local hard drives and add the local storage as datastores. After that I should be able to move all of the current VM's to the new datastores. Power them on and test them. Then basically do the same thing on the other host but only moving some of the VM's to balance the load.
Any advice or suggestions are appreciated. I can't find a way in vSphere to export the host settings so I assume I have to use command line. One question is should I configure RAID before or after I install ESXi on the flash drive? I'm thinking it may have to be done at the same time? Would it be wise to run any ESXi updates on the current host before I export the settings or should I just run the updates on the new host after I've imported the settings?
Thanks in advance!
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why ESXi?
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Agreed... Time to move to Hyper-V or Xen
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I appreciate that you aren't fans of VMware but that's what we own, what we are licensed for, and what we know. I'm not ruling out a change in the future but now is not the time.
If anyone has comments or suggestions about my plan besides scrapping VMware I would appreciate it.
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@jasonlow Looks good, just make sure you have a good backup before you start. Also I would setup the raid before the install... i don't like changing hardware after I install stuff.
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@brianlittlejohn Thank you!
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Depending on your VMware licensing, you may be able to live-migrate the VMs without any down time (Storage VMotion, I think it what its called).
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@dafyre Yes, I believe you are right but we don't have the Storage vMotion licensing. It's still the same process but without the licensing the VMs have to be powered off before they can be moved.
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I was able to complete the project and the VMs seem to be performing better on the local storage. The only downfall I see is being able to live migrate VMs between hosts, but we don't do that very often anyways. I am looking into licensing Storage vMotion to accomplish this but I'm not sure it will do what I want even if I have it. Maybe they'll give me a trail so I can test it out. Thanks for all the suggestions!
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@jasonlow said:
I was able to complete the project and the VMs seem to be performing better on the local storage. The only downfall I see is being able to live migrate VMs between hosts, but we don't do that very often anyways.
VMware added that somewhere around vSphere 5.1. You should be able to do that. Shared storage is not required.
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@jasonlow said:
I am looking into licensing Storage vMotion to accomplish this but I'm not sure it will do what I want even if I have it. Maybe they'll give me a trail so I can test it out. Thanks for all the suggestions!
That feature is so expensive, consider moving to another platform to get that rather than paying that much for it.
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@scottalanmiller I can do it if I power off the VM but not live. That basically means any maintenance I do on the host will have to be done outside business hours. The downfall is that it takes a decent amount of time to move the VMs since I have to move them to another datastore and host. Host 1 cannot see host 2's local storage. We are on 5.1 but could upgrade if you think it's different in a later version...
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@scottalanmiller said:
@jasonlow said:
I am looking into licensing Storage vMotion to accomplish this but I'm not sure it will do what I want even if I have it. Maybe they'll give me a trail so I can test it out. Thanks for all the suggestions!
That feature is so expensive, consider moving to another platform to get that rather than paying that much for it.
Yeah, that is something I need to look into. Is it an easy transition from VMware to Hyper V?
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@jasonlow said:
@scottalanmiller I can do it if I power off the VM but not live. That basically means any maintenance I do on the host will have to be done outside business hours. The downfall is that it takes a decent amount of time to move the VMs since I have to move them to another datastore and host. Host 1 cannot see host 2's local storage. We are on 5.1 but could upgrade if you think it's different in a later version...
Best practice is not to use live migration for maintenance anyway. I've seen billion dollar banks go down because they thought that they could do that and no one would notice.
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@jasonlow said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@jasonlow said:
I am looking into licensing Storage vMotion to accomplish this but I'm not sure it will do what I want even if I have it. Maybe they'll give me a trail so I can test it out. Thanks for all the suggestions!
That feature is so expensive, consider moving to another platform to get that rather than paying that much for it.
Yeah, that is something I need to look into. Is it an easy transition from VMware to Hyper V?
Relatively, yes. Check out XenServer, too. Both Hyper-V and XS are very good alternatives.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@jasonlow said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@jasonlow said:
I am looking into licensing Storage vMotion to accomplish this but I'm not sure it will do what I want even if I have it. Maybe they'll give me a trail so I can test it out. Thanks for all the suggestions!
That feature is so expensive, consider moving to another platform to get that rather than paying that much for it.
Yeah, that is something I need to look into. Is it an easy transition from VMware to Hyper V?
Relatively, yes. Check out XenServer, too. Both Hyper-V and XS are very good alternatives.
Which do you prefer? As far as performance I've heard that Hyper-V is inferior to VMware and XenServer, but that was a couple years ago. Is there any truth to that?
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@jasonlow said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@jasonlow said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@jasonlow said:
I am looking into licensing Storage vMotion to accomplish this but I'm not sure it will do what I want even if I have it. Maybe they'll give me a trail so I can test it out. Thanks for all the suggestions!
That feature is so expensive, consider moving to another platform to get that rather than paying that much for it.
Yeah, that is something I need to look into. Is it an easy transition from VMware to Hyper V?
Relatively, yes. Check out XenServer, too. Both Hyper-V and XS are very good alternatives.
Which do you prefer? As far as performance I've heard that Hyper-V is inferior to VMware and XenServer, but that was a couple years ago. Is there any truth to that?
A little, but rarely enough to notice. XenServer tends to beat VMware too. @dengelhardt say a 20% improvement going from VMware to XenServer. HyperV does fine. Your workload matters.
XenServer is the absolute best for Linux workloads. KVM tends to be the best for Windows workloads. HyperV and VMware are both good and rounded, but neither focuses heavily on performance in the same way. But all are pretty fast.
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Which do I prefer? Well the one that works best for the situation at hand, of course
I have an emotional bias for XenServer. It is open source, comes from the Linux Foundation and I've been using Xen for a dozen years. I love it. I also find it by far the easiest to use and I like Xen-based clouds like Amazon and Rackspace.
But for tons of customers I know that Hyper-V often makes more sense. It's a good solution, free and very robust. And it is advancing quickly and interfaces really well with Azure (big surprise.)
Hyper-V has a robust backup ecosystem that XenServer lacks. XS is far easier to use and scale and has more built in tools.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Which do I prefer? Well the one that works best for the situation at hand, of course
I have an emotional bias for XenServer. It is open source, comes from the Linux Foundation and I've been using Xen for a dozen years. I love it. I also find it by far the easiest to use and I like Xen-based clouds like Amazon and Rackspace.
But for tons of customers I know that Hyper-V often makes more sense. It's a good solution, free and very robust. And it is advancing quickly and interfaces really well with Azure (big surprise.)
Hyper-V has a robust backup ecosystem that XenServer lacks. XS is far easier to use and scale and has more built in tools.
Ok, well I am completely unbiased. VMware is the only one I've ever used so I'm comfortable with it. We are all Windows, currently run Lync Online, and have plans to run Sharepoint and Exchange Online in the future. We also use Unitrends for our backup software. Based on that it makes sense to me to steer towards Hyper-V. I know nothing about XenServer or KVM. It's honestly been probably 5-6 years since I've looked at Hyper-V too so I'm sure it's come a long way.
