Comments on: The Truth About VM SAN Transfers

By: Vladan

Vladan — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:38:47 +0000

Yes, the Essential plus version is most adapted for SMBs where you do not “absolutely” need vMotion and all the whistles. In the really small structures you actually Can afford to power down the VM and start it on the other ESX server, so you’ll be able to do a maintenance etc…

I can see it every day, in discussion with clients which never used virtualization in production environement. They just want something that’s cheap and provides them with the most reliability possible. vMotion for them sounds more like a comfort option…

Vladan

By: tonyr

tonyr — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 18:30:30 +0000

Don’t forget you have a free ESXi offering, and some very affordable SMB offerings. You don’t need Enterprise Plus for all scenarios !

if you want vmotion the free offering doesn’t work!

By: Phil

Phil — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 16:22:22 +0000

“Good enough for smaller/less demanding deployments, a headache for huge/demanding enterprises.”

- Agreed, and exactly where I see the long term for VMWare as a virtualisation provider, in the large scale datacentre environment, with Hyper-v in most SMB Windows environments.

By: Fernando

Fernando — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 15:17:19 +0000

Well, I agree that , depending on your demands, that can be a non-issue.
If you provision servers constantly, that will penalize you greatly. It if provision a server per quarter, that is not a problem. Again, the same pattern we could see with Hyper-V in general: Good enough for smaller/less demanding deployments, a headache for huge/demanding enterprises.

Even if it is not an issue for you, that is sill marketing misleading claims for MS, plain dishonest, as Eric mentions in the post.

Don’t forget you have a free ESXi offering, and some very affordable SMB offerings. You don’t need Enterprise Plus for all scenarios !

By: Phil

Phil — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 16:37:24 +0000

Frernando, no worries, am happy to comment on the content of the post.

The Microsoft recommendations are that you operate your SAN infrastructure seperately from the production LAN. When SCVMM is using BITS to transfer VMs into and out of clustered storage, it occurs in our environment over the iSCSI infratstructure, thus there is no load on the production LAN, its on the equipment that is there to serve storage purposes.

At the end of the day, my experience is this it just a non-issue in practice.

Having said that, the cold hard truth is that if VMWare dropped their prices to be more in line with that of other companies public sector/educational pricing, then we would obviously go for the more feature rich ESX option.

As usual, as case of Hyper-v being “good enough” for most scenarios.

By: tonyr

tonyr — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 23:07:20 +0000

ok I’m going to break the rules by discussing an as yet not available product (been testing works fine) by another (won’t say who,you can cry in your own soup) san vendor. The CSV/VSS is a done deal and so are the other points listed in this post.

By: Fernando

Fernando — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:58:23 +0000

Phil,

How about commenting the content of the post ? We all know Hyper-V *initial* cost is lower.

By: Eric Gray

Eric Gray — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:29:10 +0000

Mike, thanks for pointing that out. I’ve updated the post.

By: NiTRo

NiTRo — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:14:55 +0000

@phil

You’re right, Hyper-V is a 3rd of ESX

By: Phil

Phil — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:08:12 +0000

“Don’t make the mistake of assuming Hyper-V is just like VMware ESX. ”
….because it not just like ESX, its actually a 3rd of the price.