Wanna learn about Vmware, ESXi, vsphere etc... where a good place to start, which books?

What JMR said. I bought an old poweredge (2850) and stuck ESXi 4.1 on it and started playing- taught me heaps. Can't run 5.0 on it though due to CPU too old.

You can also run ESX in vmware workstation... although it won't be a fun way to use it :P.

Yeah you'll be fine

If you want SBS plus other things I would spec an SSD if possible for IOPS

huh? are you trying to learn vmware or play with windows? Pick a purpose, do it.

VMware on hp micro server: http://www.techhead.co.uk/running-vmware-vsphere-on-an-hp-microserver

also worth looking at Citrix Xenserver - it's the same kinda thing
we run it exclusively at work and I've got around 100 hosts under management with it

it rocks my socks

I dont really know much about it, so just want to read a nice basic book on it then start playing with it...

Nah, even a USB drive in some instances

Cool, I've been running VMWare Server at home for many many years (now eol i know) and we run vSphere 5 at the office (upgraded last month from 4) but because our vSphere build is production, I only do what I need with it which is very little as it pretty much runs itself to be honest.

I've been keen for a while to load it up on a test box and mess around with it, just finding the time is always the killer. I guess for people now coming into VMWare fresh though, it's going to be easier to start from vSphere5 with most of the command line stuff stripped out and being very gui driven.

Sort of on topic, does anybody have any recommendations for setting up a safe sandbox if afraid of malware?

Give VMware Workstation a try, it's great for desktop virtualisation. It's around $150? $199, not incredibly expensive but if it's out of the budget one of the other free ones like VirtualBox, Bochs or Xen a go. Virtual PC is getting a little long in the tooth these days because Microsoft left it to rot when they decided to put everything behind Virtual Server which morphed into HyperV somewhere along the way.

It recently struck me that the computer world really needs a programming language which allows for most of the power of executables, but each app is to be sat in its own sandbox with clean configurable limits. Would solve a whole lot of bullshit.

Programming languages alone usually aren't up to the task for this, this problem has to be tackled at the operating system and/or hypervisor level. .NET can run in a sandbox, but correctly understanding how to configuring code access security policy as it's evolved over the years in each version of the framework is almost beyond the power of mere mortals, let alone Joe Bloggs who just wants to browse Facebook and send some emails.

But yes, you can ALMOST get by without using the cli these days.

I don't get why a lot of people are scared of the CLI. Our guys seem to have a pathological aversion to it even when it could save them a huge amount of time when provisioning a crapload of servers (& provides its own level of documentation of how to recreate things). The environment I look after is pretty modest with about a dozen SQL servers but still if I had to use the GUI all the time I'd go crazy!

No doubt the GUI is great for discoverability, but when you want to get serious work done on multiple machines at once CLI beats it. They definitely both have their place.

Maybe the aversion I'm seeing isn't really CLI vs GUI at all, it could be just be resistance to learning yet another new thing where the benefit isn't immediately obvious.

I could be using host profiles in the gui though.

This is what we do cause we have Enterprise Plus licensing (not big clusters .. only like 2 hosts per cluster) but it makes things heaps quick :P

and distributed switches :P

ESXi is pretty easy ... hardest part is probably diagnosing performance issues -eg- balooning etc and what is causing it or disk IOPs. As stated ... get in and play on a server and away you go.

Also in ESXi 5 you can build "resource pools" on a single node, only thing really you would want to play with needing multiple hosts is DRS and DRS Rules (for doing things like ensuring two nodes of a cluster don't end up on the same hardware in your environment, or making a Guest VM sticky to a single host).

I guess things like adding RAW mapped luns if you want to use a MS cluster in your VMWare environment also can get a bit tricky as the LUN id's have to match accross all your hosts so when the Guest DRS's or vMotions the RAW mapped lun is still attached.


last edited by Clubby at 15:53:00 10/Feb/12

ESXi Environment:
Pretty small envrionment of maybe 20 hosts (standard host is IBM x3850X5 / x3650M3 with 256Gb ram etc) per cluster across 4-5 clusters (1 production, 1 DR, 1 UAT, 1 DEV, 1 PreProd) interfacing into many IBM SANS (DS7100, DS4200, DS3500's etc) via a cluster of IBM SVC (all running ESXi 4.x atm with 5.x being installed as I type this ... half running off the official "IBM ESXi USB Key" by turning on the "use an internal hypervision" option in the BIOS). Most the production nodes have 10Gb network for vMotion, our standard configuration is 2 NICs for the Management, vMotion, FT vSwitch and 4 NICs for the Data vSwitch.

Monitoring:
Solarwinds with VMWare integration stuff turned on
VCOps

Backup:
IBM TSM Backup w/ Dedup at the diskpool level (not the host level)

Other:
* LAB Manager running in a little envirnoment (3 hosts for some IT dev stuff)
* 2 New CISCO C210M3 machines (which are ESXi 4 hosting all the new Call Manager, UCCX, Unity etc).

All our XenDesktop and XenApp services are hosted on XenServer. It comes with pros and cons :P