[NBLUG/talk] VMware - VSphere versus ESXi

Mark Street jet at sonic.net
Tue May 24 08:51:22 PDT 2011


Thanks for the explanation John, I understand much better now.

On 5/24/2011 7:24 AM, John Nouveaux wrote:
> 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
>




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