How you can get on the Virtualization Bandwagon
One of the major technology movements in the past five years (or more) has been towards virtualization. The major enterprises and large hosting companies are embracing the idea of reducing the number of servers in their racks, and virtualizing as much as they can to save hardware, space, power and cooling, and to get the most from their hardware investments. Microsoft’s Hyper-V and VMware’s vSphere are both extremely attractive solutions for enterprises that can afford them, but that seems to leave the small to medium MSPs and smaller IT shops out in the cold, as the prices for both those products are significant. That, or they have to try to adopt workstation based virtualization platforms like Virtualbox to handle server loads, which while workable is not ideal.
Fortunately, MSPs and IT shops that want the power of virtualization without the associated budget can take advantage of the free offering from VMware called . It allows you to run multiple virtual machines on the same physical hardware, enabling you to get the maximum use out of your server hardware purchases. ESXi can install on your physical hardware in just a few minutes, and once installed you can begin installing guest virtual machines. It’s not uncommon to have a single physical server running a dozen or more virtual machines (VMs,) and all of the VMs will act as if they have dedicated hardware and are able to handle moderate to heavy loads.
Running VMs has a number of benefits, all of which you can take advantage of with the free ESXi platform. In addition to sharing physical hardware, you can actually oversubscribe memory, meaning that you can run VMs with more virtual memory than you have actual installed RAM. It is rare for a machine to use all of its memory all of the time, and oversubscribing allows you to provision VMs with enough RAM to support their load without breaking your budget. So if you have eight customers, each who request a server that needs 4GB of RAM, and you have only 32GB, you can still configure those VMs. The little bit of RAM that the hypervisor needs will not prevent you from allocating 4GB to each of those eight servers. Of course, you could allocate even more, but make sure your customers know that they are not getting a reserved memory allocation if you do.
Snapshots are another great feature of VMs. ESXi enables you to take a snapshot of a running VM, then you can make changes to the VM such as a reconfiguration or patch, and if you don’t like the results, you can revert to the snapshot instantly. It’s a great way to safely test things without permanent altering a server’s configuration. You can snapshot, patch, test and confirm safely. If you discover any issues with the patch, simply revert to the snapshot and you are right back to where you were before you started the patching. Your customers will love the fallback options that it provides.
Server consolidation is easy, as VMware has a free tool to convert a physical machine to a VM, called . You can take that old legacy system with the dodgy hardware, P2V it, and it can run as a virtual machine without further modification. It’s a great way to reduce the number of machines in your rack and get more running life from a system well past its warranty. You can go into a customer, P2V all of their running physical machines to a large USB drive, take it back to the office, and consolidate them all to a single server in your datacenter running ESXi.
ESXi also enables you to upgrade to the enterprise management capabilities of vSphere simply by purchasing and entering a key. You don’t have to reinstall, reconfigure, or change any of your running VMs. You just enter the key and you now have the central management, high availability, and other features when you are ready for them.
If you are considering ESXi to virtualize your systems, look for servers that have 64bit CPUs that support virtualization extensions, and SATA or SAS drives. IDE is not supported. This article lists the minimum hardware requirements and includes supported CPUs. You may also want to consult the hardware guide at: to find prebuilt server configurations from the major hardware vendors.
Once you have your hardware ready, download ESXi from this link . Burn the ISO to CD, mount the CD in your server’s drive, and boot. Installation is a quick and easy process that requires you only to provide an admin password, and configure networking on the management NIC. Then you can connect to the newly installed server using a web browser to download the management console software to your workstation. From there, you are ready to begin building new VMs or converting existing servers to virtual…but that is something we’ll cover in a future article.
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