[ngw] (OT) GroupWise, VMWare ESXi, ZCM, etc...

[Matt Weisberg]

Actually, you can do it without a physical SAN by using a virtual SAN.  I've actually done this for some of my small customers.  Using a virtual SAN (I use SvSAN from StorMagic, www.stormagic.com ) allows you to use the locally attached disks to build a virtual iSCSI SAN.   This way, you can use VMware features like HA and vMotion.  VMware has a reasonably priced Essentials bundle that will give you licensing for 3 dual processor servers with HA (but not vMotion, that is not available in the Essentials bundle).  So I would do that and put VMware ESX or ESXi on all 3 nodes and virtualize everything.    I have a customer with two Dell T610's running 15 VMs between the two of them right now with full HA support. 

There are also low cost options for an iSCSI SAN too.  The NetGear and IOMega NAS devices are on the VMware HCL for iSCSI SANs, and I'm sure others are too.   Heck, you can even use an NFS share for shared storage for VMware (yes, the disk channel is slow, but it does work, not sure I'd recommend that for anything mission critical).  Dell has a low cost iSCSI SAN in the MD3000i as well that is VMware approved.



Matt



On Apr 16, 2010, at 4:10 PM, Kenneth Etter wrote:

> I wondered if that was the idea.
> 
> >>> "Patrick Farrell" <pfarrell at packereng.com> 4/16/2010 4:05 PM >>>
> That's where you do a san :)  
> 
> >>> "Kenneth Etter" <kle at msktd.com> 4/16/2010 2:42 PM >>>
> Kevin,
> 
> Thanks for the reply.  If the bare metal host breaks...and everything is on the server hard drives...how do I get things back in operation?  Or are you assuming that the VMs are not on the bare metal host?
> 
> Regards,
> Ken
> 
> 
> >>> "Kevin Parris" <KPARRIS at ed.sc.gov> 4/16/2010 3:34 PM >>>
> There is at least one advantage to putting *everything* in a VM environment - mobility.  If you've got it hosted on a 1.0Ghz box and it can't keep up, you don't have to re-install or migrate or whatever, you just get a host ready on a 2Ghz box, copy the guest over, tweak host config and start it up.  whammo you've got new horsepower deployed.
> 
> I can't think of any downsides to virtualizing everything, these days.  Some will say they have to get every last ounce of performance from something, but I call those the rare exception cases.  Or maybe some specialty applications claim they are unsupported in VM environment, but that just means the developers haven't caught up to the modern world (or the app has some really exotic requirements).  With suitable equipment now, the VMware overhead isn't really very much to worry about.
> 
> And recovery, just thought of that - if you have a system running on bare metal, and that box breaks, getting that system back into operation without fixing that particular box can be tricky.  But if the bare metal host for your VM breaks, you may be able to get the guests back in operation on anything you have handy that can run a VM host environment.
> 
> No, I don't work for VMware or receive any consideration from them.  I just love the virtualization way of doing things.
> 
> >>> "Kenneth Etter" <kle at msktd.com> 04/16/10 3:11 PM >>>
> We are a small business - 65 employees.  I currently have one NetWare 6.5 server running GW8(MTA, POA, and GWIA) and ZfD 7.  I'm getting ready to purchase some new server hardware.  My original thought was to get three new servers.  Move the GW8 stuff onto the first running SLES or OES.  Setup ZCM 10 on the second (I assume SLES).  And setup ESXi on a third to host some VMs so I could replace a few auxilliary PCs doing individual tasks in my server room.  Due to lack of hardware, I haven't had a chance to play with ESXi yet.  I'm also fairly new to Linux, although I do have GMS and Reload running on SLES.  Does this sound reasonable?  Or does anyone have a better suggestion?  Thanks!
> 
> Regards,
> Ken Etter
> 
> _______________________________________________
> ngw mailing list
> ngw at ngwlist.com 
> http://ngwlist.com/mailman/listinfo/ngw
> 
> Visit our website: http://www.packereng.com 
> _______________________________________________
> ngw mailing list
> ngw at ngwlist.com
> http://ngwlist.com/mailman/listinfo/ngw
> _______________________________________________
> ngw mailing list
> ngw at ngwlist.com
> http://ngwlist.com/mailman/listinfo/ngw

--------
Matt Weisberg
Weisberg Consulting, Inc.
matt at weisberg.net
www.weisberg.net
ofc. 248.685.1970
cell 248.705.1950
fax 248.769.5963