SMB and ESX3i with a very low budget Part I (uno)

9 months ago…
An SMB customer with 10 old Dell physcial servers that needed to be retired and a very, very , very tight budget for upgrades. The challenges were to keep the costs down and still provide the same or better performance that we had with the physical environment. No budget for Virtulaization software software, no budget for a SAN, no budget for fancy storage, and no budget for backup software, etc. I had utilized ESX3i in the past for SMB's, for DR purposes and for lab testing in the past. I decided to do some more thorough testing in my lab and found out what I could get away with using ESX3i as a host and as a potential production solution.
Enter VMware and some some ingenuity

Testing Environment
1 Dell 1950 III and 1 HP DL360 G2 each with 8GB of RAM, 2 NIC's and 128GB of local storage
VMware ESX3i
1 Iomega NAS 500GB
Modified Ghettovcb.sh
Gigabit switch
VMware's P2V

Testing and Findings
After I was satisfied with my testing I introduced 2 new economical Dell rack servers, VMware ESX3i and an Iomega NAS for backups. I P2V each physical machine to the ESX3i hosts. I sized each host server to house 5 VM's each. However, if one of the hosts failed I would have the other host capable of taking over and run all 10 VM's. Since ESXi does not support HA and the VM are local to the datastores I also had to come up with a backup and restore/recovery plan for my VM's.
I found that the VM's perform better on the local data stores than on the NAS. Therefroe, I would keep the running VM's on each local data store and use the NAS as a backup and as a recovery device.

Local datastores for the VM's- 5 VM's per Host
NAS for VM backups and ISO's, etc.

Backups
I also had to worry about backups and what if I lose a host or a VM. What then, how do I restore or recover the VM’s with no backup software and no shared sotrage? I found a backup script called ghettovcb.sh and modified it for my VM backups. I used the Iomega NAS to hold my VM backups. What I also came up with was that my backups could be used for a recovery. Since the VM backups were already on NAS presented to both ESXi hosts as an NFS volume. I could easily just add the *.vmx file back to the inventory of the running ESXi host and fire up the VM.

The VM backups to the NAS run slow and the VM’s perform better on local data store. I could also restore the VM to the ESXi local data store if we have the time or the performance is to slow when the VM’s are running from the NAS .

Production Hardware
2- Dell 1950 III servers each with 16GB RAM, 4 NICS, 2 Intel Xeon 2Ghz Dual Core Procs and 2 250GB SATA drives configured as RAID1
ESX3i
1- Iomega StorCeneter iX2 Network Storage NAS Server 1TB raw or 500GB RAID1
1 Gigabit Switch
P2V

Production Recomendations
Run the VM's from ESX host local datastores for better performance
Use the NAS for VM backups and for recovery

Where to get ghettovcb.sh script http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-8760

Where to get VMware’s ESX3i
http://downloads.vmware.com/d/info/datacenter_downloads/vmware_esxi/3_5
Note: I have not done any testing with ESX4i

Iomega NAS example on where to buy
http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.aspx?EDC=1591013

Once the customer can get some budget dollars we can get a better solution in place however, we will still be looking to keep the costs down to a minimum wherever we can. Part II (dos) to follow soon…

Adding an NFS datastore to ESX 3.5 using an EMC Iomega StorCenter iX2

1. Attach to the Iomega NAS device
2. Select Configure
3. Set the Device Name -For example: NASSTORE
3. Set the password:
4. Set email notification: xxx@xxxx.com
5. Set the Timezone
6. Restart the device

7. Change the IP from DHCP to a Dedicated IP Adrress: 192.168.xx.xx
8. Restart the device

9. Setup NFS under Settings then choose NFS
10. Enable NFS Service

11. Setup Shares
12. Create the Share with No Security
13. Share Name- For Example: NASSHARE

14. Open the VI3 Client and setup Networking
15. Select the Configuration tab and then Select Networking
15. Create an iSCSI Console on an existing vSwitch and assign an IP to it or create a new vSwitch 16. Add a NIC to the vSwitch

This assumes you already have iSCSI configured
17. Select Storage Adapters in the Configuration tab
18. Select the iSCSI Software Adapter
19. Click on Properties
20. Select Dynamic Discovery tab
21. Add the IP address of the NAS device

Add Storage
22. Add Storage with the VI client under the Configuration then Storage Tab
23. Choose NFS then Next
24. Server is the IP or name of the NAS device
25. Folder is the Full Path of NFS Export: /nfs/NASSHARE
26. Datastore Name is the friendly name of the ESX datastore to be created
27. Then choose Next

You should now see the new NASVMFS datasore in the Storage tab of your ESX server. You can now begin to use the NFS datastore.

How to start a VM from command line in 2 steps

This command will list the VM's that are located on an ESX server datastore whether they are running VM's or not. Copy the path so that you can later paste it in to your next command in step 2.
1. vmware-cmd -l

This command will start the VM in the path below. Paste the path of the VM
Example:
2. vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/493d215c-54090920-3855-02219516464/PHMEX2K7HTCAS/PHMEX2K7HTCAS.vmx start