When planning a new virtualization environment, consolidation numbers are always flying around, and specifically the number of VMs you can run on a host.
According to This Doc you can have a max of 320 VMs per host, but keep in mind the number’s different for HA clusters. I was also pleased to find out the numbers were slightly changed for Update 1.
When we’re ready to deploy new ESXi hosts in our environment, we order them from Dell with ESXi pre-loaded on the internal SD-Card. This is nice and all, but what do you do when you have to go through and configure NTP, Users, Groups, Scratch directory, lockdown mode, and the list goes on?
You’d have to fire up each server, go through and configure everything, x10 if you had 10 new servers.
Since we’re working on a new rather larger virtualization deployment, we were looking at ways to overcome this.
Well, Cisco finally came with an answer to why I was able to break the stuff like clock work before, and that answer was firmware. A new firmware has been release for the chassis, blades, & FEX (and I’m sure I’ve either got that in the wrong order or hardware), but I can’t say I’m excited about it.
We set more time aside to have Cisco come in and upgrade the bits, as if we haven’t wasted enough time already. This time, they sent the big guns to work on it, or gun, rather, as they sent one of the engineers named Troy. He was a good guy, very knowledgeable, but he can’t help it that he works for Cisco, we’ve all gotta eat, right?
Okay, so now that we’ve tested different OS installations, now it’s time to test the real purpose we acquired these blades for: Virtualization
A little info on the hardware: Cisco N20-B6620-1, dual Xeon E5540s, 24GB of RAM, and two 73gb drives
We’re using VMware ESXi 4.0u1 for our testing, and booting from the SAN. Yes, I know, it’s only still experimental with vSphere, I don’t like it, but that’s the path I was lead down by my superiors.
We were some of the earliest of ‘adopters’ for a paid POC to get the Cisco UCS system in-house.
Cisco sent the hardware & a group of techs to get this thing off the ground. Any new hardware being deployed shouldn’t require a group of people from the vendor to come out to set it up, should it? In today’s society, it should be user friendly, plug-n-play, which we all know Cisco to be, right? Heh, okay, or not, but anyway, our trouble had just begun.