VMware ESXi

I would assume it would be the opposite of what I found out.

- had demo of ESX 3.5 installed, then the ESXi came out free, regged and recieved my serial number for ESXi, input that into ESX and many options disappeared.

id guess entering an ESX SN into an ESXi install would enable options?
 
MorfiusX said:
The partner training documentation states ESXi will fully work with a VMware Infrastructure.

http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi/#c84528
"Seamlessly Upgrade to VMware Infrastructure
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Yes, it does state that. I was in on the conference on the web on launch date (for free release) as well. There are some caveats, though.

MorfiusX said:
* Upgrading to VMware Infrastructure 3, the most widely deployed virtual infrastructure suite in the market, is as simple as adding a license file.
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You can upgrade from ESXi to ESX by pointing the ESXi installation at a license file or license server, as you would normally do with ESX when going from trial version to licensed version. The result is the same, the ESXi installation will poll the license file features to determine what features you will have access to.

MorfiusX said:
* VMware Infrastructure delivers improved service levels and operational efficiency by enabling centralized management, automatic load balancing, business continuity, power management and the ability to live migrate a virtual machine across physical machines to minimize service interruption.
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Yes, Infrastructure does. However, Infrastructre refers to ESX, not ESXi. This is marketing hype, and intentional misdirection. VMWare Instructure versions of ESX (which include Foundation, Statdard, and Enterprise) are what they are referring to, not ESXi.

MorfiusX said:
* The capabilities of VMware Infrastructure are supported on both VMware ESXi and VMware ESX."
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This is also true, but can be easily misconstrued without further information. ESXi supports the full set of ESX features...if you give it an ESX license file or license server. On it's own, it supports HA, DRS, VMotion, etc...but you can't use them.

MorfiusX said:
Now, I would imagine in order to allow this to work with VI, some type of license would need to be purchased. That doesn't mean ESXi won't work with VI, it just means that it requires proper licensing.
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Yep, that's essentially your answer. Basically, ESXi is designed to be a single physical host environment. There's no HA, no DRS, no VMotion. You cannot integrate another ESXi host into a Datacenter, Cluster, or resource pool, as you can with ESX. The basic rule of thumb for ESXi:

If the feature you are interested in requires more than one physical host machine to function, it is not available on ESXi. Sure, you can run multiple ESXi hosts in your environment, but they will be utterly unaware of one another until licensed as ESX machines and managed with Virtual Center Server.
 
so...this may sound really dumb...
but what is the point of vmware?
 
brisk said:
so...this may sound really dumb...
but what is the point of vmware?
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Run multiple operating systems on a single box at the same time, without interfering with one another
 
ah..thats what i thought.

so the 1 computer that is running the vmware must be powerful no?
 
brisk said:
ah..thats what i thought.

so the 1 computer that is running the vmware must be powerful no?
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It depends on what your goals are. If you are just using it for testing, then a regular desktop or laptop with VMware Workstation will be just fine. I have ran virtualization software for a test server on a PIII 1ghz. It wasn't fast, but it did the job. The biggest thing to consider with ESXi is that it has a limited hardware compatibility list.
 
brisk said:
ah..thats what i thought.

so the 1 computer that is running the vmware must be powerful no?
Click to expand...

depends on use, for example at work I consolidated bunch of low utilization(fax server, backup server, lamp for internal testing, file & print) machines into 1 low end server. Of course if you want to stick things like sql, exchange or other busy servers then you will need something pretty powerful.
 
I install VMware ESXi 3.5 onto one of my old machines and reboot and take out the CD.

It comes up but the IP is set to 0.0.0.0.

I hit "F2" then go to "Configure Management Network" and hit "Enter" for more info.

When I do that it asks me if I want to Reset the Management Network and I should press F11 to do it.

I can not get the screen to change IP, etc.

I have tried an A) Intel Gigabit Desktop PCI-Express NIC and B) Intel Pro1000 MT PCI-X NIC and C) onboard 925 Gigabit NIC - I am guessing it's because none of these network cards are supported?

EDIT: The Intel Pro/1000 MT PCI-X Gigabit NIC is on the list.

SECOND EDIT: I re-installed with the Intel Pro/1000 MT NIC in the system and everything was good.

So lesson learned? Make sure the hardware works *THEN* install.
 
fibroptikl said:
I install VMware ESXi 3.5 onto one of my old machines and reboot and take out the CD.

It comes up but the IP is set to 0.0.0.0.

I hit "F2" then go to "Configure Management Network" and hit "Enter" for more info.

When I do that it asks me if I want to Reset the Management Network and I should press F11 to do it.

I can not get the screen to change IP, etc.

I have tried an A) Intel Gigabit Desktop PCI-Express NIC and B) Intel Pro1000 MT PCI-X NIC and C) onboard 925 Gigabit NIC - I am guessing it's because none of these network cards are supported?

EDIT: The Intel Pro/1000 MT PCI-X Gigabit NIC is on the list.

SECOND EDIT: I re-installed with the Intel Pro/1000 MT NIC in the system and everything was good.

So lesson learned? Make sure the hardware works *THEN* install.
Click to expand...


Glad to hear you got it working...keep us updated with what your doing.
 
MorfiusX said:
Now, I would imagine in order to allow this to work with VI, some type of license would need to be purchased. That doesn't mean ESXi won't work with VI, it just means that it requires proper licensing.
Click to expand...

Yeah, thanks for linking the training doc. I am not impressed with the person I talked to at our VMware reseller. I had bought Workstation just over the web without to deal with resellers, but once ESXi came up and considering there is some existing VI3 around here, I figured I'd get to the bottom of it and the guys who run VI3 said to contact our reseller.

I do have to maintain though that VMware's licensing is very convoluted, right up there with Cisco's. Still glad to find out that ESXi can be integrated into an existing ESX setup by just upgrading the license.

New questions in regards to ESXi and SATA drives arose: VMware ESXi 3.5 & 8-port SATA controllers.
 
I posted in that thread.
No problems here.
Dell PE840, quad core Xeon, 8gb DDR, 4x 146gb sas, 4x 640gb Sata, all on a LSI Logic 3080X
 
I currently have on my Vista machine a virtual windows 2003 server (virtual workstation client) and i would like to move it to my new physical server with a fresh install of ESXi.

I'm using VMware converter to move everything over but am running into problems. Everything is fine up until the "host" part in the destination section. There are no hosts or resources to choose from. I've tried this both from the Vista machine and on the Win2k3 machine. Am I doing something wrong or missing a step somewhere?
 
only VMWare Enterprise converter (licensed feature for ESX, not ESXi) can convert an existing physical machine, virtual machine image, or backup image to a .VMDK file without specifying a host to move the machine to. The free VMWare Converter Standard requires that you specify a target for the converted machine (aka, a host). You can't get it all for free. You basically have to have a separate machine as an ESXi host already setup and running, in order to fulfill the requirements of destination host in the VMWare Converter standard. It will not complete the process without this information. If you only have 1 machine to use, you're kind of screwed.
 
sabregen said:
only VMWare Enterprise converter (licensed feature for ESX, not ESXi) can convert an existing physical machine, virtual machine image, or backup image to a .VMDK file without specifying a host to move the machine to. The free VMWare Converter Standard requires that you specify a target for the converted machine (aka, a host). You can't get it all for free. You basically have to have a separate machine as an ESXi host already setup and running, in order to fulfill the requirements of destination host in the VMWare Converter standard. It will not complete the process without this information. If you only have 1 machine to use, you're kind of screwed.
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What? You can set the host as a external hard drive. Then setup ESXi and just copy the vm to it. Thats what I would do.
 
Well I have two machines right now.

1) My PC(Built computer) running Vista as the primary OS. I'm using VMware workstation to run Windows 2003 server.

2) Dell PowerEdge server running ESXi. I have it configured a Static IP and DNS. I'm able to commuincate with it with my PC via web console or VMware infrastructure client.

I can even get past the step where it ask for credentials in the VMconverter (tried both in Vista and Windows 2003). I just get to the host part and nothing shows up. Am I missing something somewhere? I didn't see anything in ESXi to set. Everything was pretty basic.
 
Put in the IP address of your ESXi server in the host field. Then put in root for the username and your password that you created during setup.
 
that's exactly what I did. then I get to the "host" category and nothing is there to select. I ended up creating a resource and then I was able to choose it to transfer everything over to the ESXi server. Not sure if I did that right or not...
 
perhaps I misunderstood your question then. I thought that you were having issues specifying a host system to receive the image (which is basically doing a VM import on that host, after the VM is converted from the source).

The way that I understand you question now is that you have no options in the menu where you are trying to select the type of host, not the host itself. Strange that you would have no options there, and you have to create the resource manually. I don't know it that will work, or not either.

nitrobass24 = in this case, the "host" in ESXi is the machine that will be the "host" (physical machine hardware that is running the ESXi OS) to the "guests" (which in this case would be the VMs that he intends to run). The drive where the VMDK files are stored is going to be a SCSI (of some sort....SATA behind a controller, SAS, FC, iSCSI, SCSI, etc) target. The "host" is not the hard drive where the VMDK lives.
 
Creating the resource manually worked. It just reset my IP address to DHCP rather than static like I had it. No biggie. I haven't found any other issues as of yet. Thanks for you help!
 
I'm putting in the disk and trying to load the ISO on ther server. I'm getting the error: "Unable to find supported device to install VMware ESX Server 3i 3.5.0 Image to."

I'm using an Areca ARC-1120 sata raid card in raid6. And thats apparently supported.

Any ideas? this is my production server and I'm really hoping I can get it running.
 
Also, there's a new subforum for virtualization now, would be worth posting in there, of nothing else, to get the thread where it now should be located, and draw more traffic to it.
 
`danny said:
No you can use just one NIC. Make sure you set every VM to have a bridged NIC and you are good to go.
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I have dual NIC's in the box anyways, But good to know. We are very new to VMware but you have to start somewhere! :cool:

Anyone ever done a Symantec V2i from an exsisting server to a VM on new hardware? We're going to be doing that in house to learn it then on a clients site. /stress.
 
Any physical to virtual conversions that you are going to do will involve Vconverter (or a 3rd party tool). The converter is free for stand-alone VMs (think player, fusion, workstation, server) but you need an enterprise license to import into a virtual center (ESX/ESXi)
 
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