[NBLUG/talk] VMware - VSphere versus ESXi

[John Nouveaux]

Mark,

On May 23, 2011, at 10:04 PM, Mark Street wrote:
> Has anyone worked with VMware VSphere as compared to ESXi?

I presume you are referring to running ESXi managed by vCenter (utilizing vCenter's advanced feature set [VMotion, Storage VMotion, HA, etc.) and the "ESXi" in this first statement was meant to be "VMware Server"? In any event...

vSphere is more of an umbrella marketing term, rather than a specific product one buys. Generally when I refer to vSphere I'm thinking of ESXi in a vCenter environment.

> I am looking at purchasing a couple of beefy Dell R610 servers to consolidate some of my legacy iron onto and start utilizing some cloud services and storage.
> 
> I have been running VMware Server for years on CentOS (Dell PwrEdge 2970 2x2core AMD 2220, 16G RAM) with a small horde of VM's running just fine.


[Without knowing specific details about the VMs and apps you are running and attempting to keep this short...]

Due to its architecture, ESXi will run VMs more efficiently than VMware Server.

ESXi/vCenter have higher/larger maximums (more virtual CPUs per VM to take but a single example) than VMware Server.

If you purchase a vSphere license (for ESXi and vCenter) you can take advantage of vCenter's advanced features:

- vMotion (moving running VMs from one ESXi server to another to either load balance or in anticipation of maintenance)
- Storage vMotion (moving running VMs backend storage files to another datastore [for various reasons])
- High Availability (a.k.a. HA, which reboots VMs which die or VMs which find themselves on ESXi servers which have died)

and so on.

I can get more specific as the discussion warrants or, Mark, feel free to contact me off list if you want.

john

P.S. I've been doing vSphere training for VMware since 2004 so I know a few things about the vSphere product set. ;-)

John Nouveaux
Nouveaux Solutions
john at nouveaux-solutions.com