Deploy VMware

Do you ever have one of those days when something in IT (Information Technology) actually works as advertised? It’s rare, but a welcome break from the death spirals that all too often lie in wait.

The constant change in IT means you also have to constantly reality-check the conventional wisdom. We first mentioned that Exchange 2007 was supported on VMware when we saw VMware’s excellent paper on their own adventure to make it happen.

Our own conversion of Exchange 2007 to VMware was flawless and without anything exciting to report except that it worked.  Granted, we have a smaller footprint of less than 200 mailboxes and consuming just under 100 gig of storage. Here’s the quick recipe:

1. Full Backup AND Restore test (skip it at your own peril)
2. Run VMware’s vCenter converter
3. Power up the Virtual Machine and assign the correct IP address
4. Soak test

It goes without saying, that you should plan for downtime, communication with your end users, and a back-out plan if the wheels come off.  But you do all of those things already, right?

What have we gained with Exchange 2007 on VMware?

It’s nice to have the High Availability from VMware for starters.  An unexpected benefit is an Exchange 2007 reboot on a Virtual Machine takes a lot less time.

Don’t forget to grab our VMware price lists and get started challenging conventional IT wisdom!

VMware Pricing

There’s always a danger in posting a reference diagram with actual hardware and pricing. Besides the obvious problems of fluctuating prices, the almost religious fervor that surrounds these choices generates more heat than light.

Nevertheless, I’m going to do it anyway. Let’s get the ground rules out of the way with this thought experiment before we cover the disclaimers:

Small Businesses can benefit from VMware but face these challenges:

• The value proposition is often non-obvious at their small scale
• They have no time or desire to tinker or experiment
• They need to know all of the costs before proceeding
• They want a solution, not a concept
• They really could care less about “V-Anything” names

Entry-Level with some Scalability

One way to quickly get to cost is to articulate a hardware platform made up of real equipment with real prices.  Let’s ignore the religion of what hardware gets chosen and lay out some simple requirements for an entry-level environment:

1. It has to be production-ready and work with VMware
2. It has to be entry-level
3. It has to have some scaling capabilities and yet not burden small business by paying for scale that’s mostly unused or might never be used

Clearly, there will be trade-offs and your own requirements will dictate your choices. With those simple requirements, these choices were derived:

• Quantity two (2) identical ESX host platforms with local storage, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, and at least 4GB of memory.
  

  Why two? You want a hardware platform that can scale all the way from the free ESXi server to VI Enterprise without changing out the underlying hardware.

• Quantity one (1) iSCSI external storage with the range of JBOD to RAID flexibility.
  

  Why external and why iSCSI? You don’t know it yet, but you’re going to want the live Virtual Machine migration feature known as VMotion when you can afford the license. You don’t want to reconfigure your storage.

Costs

For the ESX hosts, I chose Dell’s 1950 with 4GB of RAM for $1,950 per machine for a total of $3,900. For the external storage, I picked the Thecus i4500R with 4TB of raw storage for $1,680.

That brings the price of a production-ready small business VMware hardware environment to $5,580.

Still Not the Whole Story

In my next post, I’ll fill in the VMware license and support costs to fully illuminate the choices available  for this hardware environment. The usefulness of this approach is you can answer specific questions without the “it depends” uncertainty that is an immediate red flag to small business owners.

After all, if it was your money, would you get in the virtualization taxi-cab without knowing the rate or the trip’s distance?

–

Paul Ely | Technical Operations Director | E-Oasis

VMware Pricing

We’ve updated the VMware MSRP price lists. Enter your e-mail in the form on the right for an immediate download. I know VMware options can be confusing and I’m here to help you understand them.

Call me anytime with your questions,

–

Paul Ely | Technical Operations Director | E-Oasis

Toll Free: 1-877-485-1115 x101

Use promo code FIRSTORDER for 5% off your first order from us.

VMware Pricing

VMware has released a white paper detailing how they successfully virtualized their Exchange 2007 environment. Achieving a 4:1 consolidation ratio, the entire virtualized Exchange environment consists of 40 Virtual Machines running on 10 ESX hosts. VMware was successfully able to utilize:

• VMware High Availability (HA)
• VMware Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS)
• VMware vMotion

Special attention was payed to the storage subsystem to balance capacity versus performance.

The physical hardware utilized was the HP c7000 blade servers and EMC CXC3-80 storage.

Daily backups are done using traditional Exchange streaming backups to virtual tape libraries

One feature of their design is the use of two data centers to gain the advantage of physical diversity. The production environment also utilized the new Exchange Server replication technology Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR). The file share witness used by CCR to maintain quorum was housed in a third data center (not shown).

The full white paper can be instantly downloaded here.

VMware also has these outstanding Exchange resources listed here.

Give us a call if we can help you with your Exchange on VMware project.

Don’t forget we offer a Free Data Center Move Guide!

VMware Implementation, VMware Pricing

Small business owners focused on their business do not have the luxury of time and resources to evaluate technology just because they read about it in the trade press or in a blog. Benefits that remain obscure are not going to break through the everyday realities of operating a small business.

VMware is no different. Can it help small business? Certainly. Is it obvious how? That depends on lots of factors, but mostly it is not only not obvious but comes across as complex and more expensive.

Most benefit discussions don’t map well to the Small Business Owner’s perspective. They might conclude that VMware “could” help them, but first they spend some money, change the way they do things, and then see some benefits.

Rejected. Small Business Owners don’t have the time or patience to do the typical VMware “pilot program”.  They’re not interested in “first, get a SAN (storage area network)”, or “cuts IT administrative costs”, or “be leaner and agile”, or “reduces power consumption”.

“Start with the Free Stuff”, you say and find what is right for you. Rejected again. Do you honestly believe experimentation is the best use of a Small Business owner’s time?

VMware saves you money. Prove it. Prove that statement for the benefit of a Small Business owner without first requiring them to do all the work.

VMware will save you money.

We can prove it to a Small Business Owner in your language without wasting your time. Send us an e-mail or give us a call.

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VMware Implementation, VMware Pricing

Managing a data center full of VMware servers can be a challenge. Fortunately, Raritan now has an offering that eases this burden with their CommandCenter Secure Gateway which integrates with VMware Virtual Center. Among the features are:

• Auto-discovery of virtual machines
• One place to access both virtual servers and physical servers
• Support for VMotion (automated or manual move of virtual machines from one ESX to another)

The auto-discovery screen shot shows how VMs can be configured after being found.

A management screen shot shows how all devices can be managed in one place:

Learn more about Raritan’s CommandCenter at their web site.

VMware Pricing

Effective 2 Dec. 2008, VMware changed these product names. Use this table to cross reference between old and new names.

VMware Pricing

Enter your e-mail address in the form on the right to receive download instructions for:

 

1. VMware Infrastructure Price List (ESX)
2. VMware Advanced Products Price List (VDI,Lab Manager, Site Recovery Manager)
3. VMware Workstation Products Price List (Workstation, Fusion, Server, ACE)

Follow @deployvmware on Twitter for future updates to the price list.

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VMware Pricing

VMware will be offering  VMware View to include VDI. Look for these new components to be introduced in 2009:

VMware View Composer – Advanced image management for virtual desktops allows you to:

• Reduce storage cost and management by up to 90 percent
• Reduce desktop provisioning from 15 minutes to just seconds
• Manage hundreds of desktops from a single central image, retaining user settings when updating or patching service packs, application updates or even OS upgrades
• Roll back instantaneously, enabling customers to streamline management and guarantee that all user systems are up to date
• Reduce the number of images to manage

VMware Offline Desktop – Access virtual desktops whether online or offline to:

• Backup critical user data and applications for remote employees
• Create transparent user environments on the road or in the office
• Increase user productivity while decreasing management complexity and risks
• Harness local compute power for a superior PC-like end user experience while maintaining data back ups and settings

VMware Client Virtualization – With virtualization for laptops and desktops PCs you can:

• Reduce the number of PC images with hardware independent virtual desktops that run on each PC
• Provide centralized management of VDI users and virtual client users from the same management console
• Enable users to take advantage of local PC hardware for superior user experience and offline usage

VMware Pricing

Enter your e-mail address in the form to your right to receive the recently updated VMware MSRP price list.

You can follow future price list updates on Twitter.

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VMware Pricing