First Experiences with VMware 3i

Overall, I love it. I'm might start drinking the VMware 3i koolaid. And if you're familiar with VMware Server, this will be an easy transition. Or if you are new, you'll need to hover over icons until you remember what they are. This is pretty easy though. If you don't know, 3i is now free. 3i is a slimmed down version of 3.5 which cuts multiple host type features (e.g. VMotion, Update Manager, etc).

So, I finally had some time today, and after reading all the documentation that came with my new server (Dell PowerEdge 2900 III) and inspecting the inside & removing the USB flash drive (Kingston 1GB) I fired it up. And yes, I normally read all documentation before I start to use a product. And boy, do I like the purr of a dual quad core, six 15k hard drive, & dual power supply server. After about 30 minutes, I actually turned off the music since it was bothering me and listened to the humming of the server.

Some notes on the 3i setup on my Dell. I quickly ran through the BIOS configuration and realized even though I had (read: paid / I don't have enough time in my life with my new daughter) Dell to pre-load 3i on this server, they did not enable the internal USB port to allow VMware 3i booting and on the CPU instructions, VT was disabled. If you recall from my previous blog posting, Intel's VT or AMD-V is a requirement. Nice touch Dell. After that, I booted it up, and 3i just loaded. I changed the root password and set the DHCP IP to static and then used another PC's web browser to download the VMware Infrastructure Client (aka VI Client) which is used to manage your ESx host. The only aspect of 3i I had to configure was storage. So, I gave all 6 hard drives in a RAID 10 configuration to VMware (file system is called VMFS, and I set the block size to 1MB, since I don't expect to have a single file over 256GB) to 3i. So, it handled the formating and everything. So, I now had 836GB of space.

After that, my first OS to install on my new VMware server was Windows 2008 Standard 64 bit. You run through adding a new virtual machine, and I select a CPU, 1GB of ram, and 20GB of hard drive space and place the install CD on your local PC and then select "Connect DVD" and your local DVD/CD automatically appears on the "server vm". I was running this via a 10/100 network, and the install proceeded very quickly compared to Windows 2003. Keep in mind, I had never installed 2008 before. It went very smoothly the install. No issues on install or setup. But, little did I know, the new server OS takes over 10.5GB of space. Holy smokes. I guess I'll be re-installing Windows 2008 again. Oh well.

The management console shows quite a number of performance related statistics (e.g. overall memory usage, network, hard drive, etc) for all virtual machines. Like I initially said, anyone with any VMware Workstation/Server experience will feel right at home, otherwise it's still fairly easy to get around. I'll post again once I dig deeper in the product.

-Ben

P.S. Comments or feedback is always welcome.