Getting More For Less From VMware

How the indigent can still benefit from virtualization

Jason WhitakerTransylvania University

vSphere 4 Enterprise, 1 processor, up to 256GB memory, 1 year production support = $3,600 vanilla online purchase price

Your important production environments may need HA, VMotion, etc, but not everything is “important”…

Test environments, tools, other “low impact” virtual machines may not need all of the bells and whistles

VMware is great, but it costs money!

ESXi is the bare bones virtualization offering It’s FREE! No HA, VMotion, templates… …but it does do snapshots, memory over-

commitment, NIC teaming, HBA multipathing, and has a vCLI… all of the nice features of VMware

You can deploy an appliance to ESXi, so it makes a great testing ground, or you can make appliances of your own VMs with Converter

Enter VMware ESXi

There are not-so-pricey VM software offerings out there, so you can get more functionality out of ESXi

Check out www.trilead.com and look at their “VMX” VM Explorer product – allows you to make snapshot backups of your ESXi VMs

Check out www.veeam.com and look at their FastSCP product – lets you copy files to and from ESXi datastores

More for ESXi

VMware Essentials and Essentials Plus packages can add some of the high end features

Essentials gives you three licenses of ESXi or ESX with vCenter agent, vStorage API/VCB, vCenter server for Essentials for $995 – so you can manage ESXi deployments in one vCenter, and use backup products that require vStorage API such as vRanger

Essentials Plus adds HA and Data Recovery, but the price jumps up

Need more? No problem!

Getting More For Less From VMware

How the indigent can still benefit from virtualization

Jason WhitakerTransylvania University