ESXi

I have vcenter server, lab manager, and 4 esx hosts. Each of my esx hosts are identical, with 2 quad core cpus, 32gb of ram, and 1tb of disk space.

I would like to be able to deploy machines to any host at any time.

For example, if someone in our lab needs a winxp machine, they should just be able to go to the winxp template, click deploy, and not care about which machine it was running on. I want more than one person to be able to deploy the same identical configuration at any time.

From what I can tell, it appears that first of all, in order to do this I would need a SAN - thus wasting the disk space on each of the servers - am I wrong? Can I make all of these servers share each other's disk space as if it were a single datastore?

Secondly, it appears that a template can only be deployed one at a time (which being a template, you don't want people mucking around with it anyway) and that a configuration is limited to one deployment at a time.

Can a configuration be configured to be deployed many times without cloning it?

Can a VM template be configured to use any available resource? It seems that it can, with the exception of disk space - the disk space needs to be shared somehow

Can the esx servers share their data stores with each other? Via NFS? or with vmotion?

Did I miss some network configuration or something that would make this possible without a SAN?

You'll need a 3rd party store for this to work properly.

In the mean time LefthandNetworks have a solution that makes local datastores accesible as if they were NAS devices.

the only other alternative is an appliance like FreeNas or Openfiler

Here's the link to OpenFiler:

http://www.openfiler.com

You could put a VM running OpenFiler on the local disk space of each of your four ESX hosts, creating four different VMware-available OpenFiler datastores that could be carved up to provide iSCSI connections for each of your ESX hosts. You could use the built-in software iSCSI initiator that comes delivered with ESX. VMs that would be located on the OpenFiler datastores could be moved around with VMotion (assuming you're using VCenter) as if the OpenFiler datastores were a shared SAN, with shared disk space available amongst your four ESX hosts. Note that performance of the OpenFiler VMs wouldn't be on the same level as a true SAN but might be good enough for what you're intending to do. Another option would be to just install OpenFiler directly onto a separate hardware server that has a bunch of hard drives in it and then dish out the OpenFiler drive space to the ESX hosts from that setup -- the speed in this case would likely be faster than that datastores coming off the OpenFiler VMs but wouldn't be at the same level as that of a true SAN.

Datto

If you prefer a SAN before a NAS device, LeftHand is a goof choice for you since it uses iSCSI unline the NAS solutions:

http://www.compaq.com/storage/highlights/lefthandsans.html

Kind Regards,

Gerrit Lehr

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In your case really better to use SAN. Additionally, I wouldn`t recoomend you to use OpenFiler or FreeNas - their iSCSI targets is based on EIT, which is very bugful. OF is not bad only when it comes to NFS. And from all available iSCSI targets I can say that the most affordable for are only three - Datacore, StarWindand Lefthand. My recommandation is StarWind. Will be glad to help.

Thanks for the help guys.

I will evaluate some software san solutions until the budget opens up for something nice with hardware. Thank you all for your suggestions!