I have some time off from work and want to use it to do some maintenance on my two servers. Right now they are running esxi v 6 with vcenter. I have a license from VMUG which expires in April. My options are upgrade to 6.5 since it just was released on VMUG or move onto a different platform such as Proxmox. I been trying to decide if it's worth it to pay for another year for VMUG or move onto the free VM platform.
Some details.
I have two nodes:
Node 1: E3-12xx CPU with 32GB ram.
VM on it: I run WS2012R2 Essentials with pass through LSI card that is built into the MB and usb 3 card which i use to connect a USB HDD for quartly backups.. The LSI card is flashed in IT mode. I also have a minecraft server, sophos router and vcenter application running on it.
Node 2: Dual E5-26xx with 128GB ram. I have one raid cards and usb 3 card all on pass through. One raid card flashed to IT mode goes to freenas which has some old drives that i share out to linux hosts for storage. The other raid card is used to create a raid for VMs to live on. It has 3 x 3TB Red HDD with a 1GB SSD cache made up of 4 256GB consumer SSD drives in Raid 10. The usb 3 card is pass to a windows 8 VM and has an external 4TB USB Drive that is used for storage.
As for VMs on this server, I have 1 Windows 8 used for work, 1 WS2012R2 used for dev, 1 minecraft server, freenas, pfsense, and about 10 or so ubuntu servers that have various software builds on it ( Websphere, DB2, etc.) these last VMs aren't always on, unless I'm actively working on them.
As for backups. Only node 1 has XSIbackup running on it. When node 2 was setup and I started to use it with out setting up a real backup option. I would like to have some backups of VMs i spent a lot of time installing software on. I been looking at XSIbackup pro for 105 USD and free version of Veeam for backup options to automate it.
Options / Advise
Option 1- If I stay with Vmware, my expense will be 200 for VMUG and possibly the 105 for XSIbackup ( I might go with free version). I can upgrade to version 6.5 (unless someone notes it will break any of the passthrough i listed above.)
option 2- Move everything over to Proxmox. Proxmox seems to have built in backup of VMs. It also seems to be way more hands on then ESXI, especially when it comes to pass through. I played with basics in Virtualbox so I haven't really tried all the pass-through tests.
Option 3 - You guys give me some suggestions.
Let me know what you think.
PS i also though of consolidating down all storage, etc. but i dont feel comfortable having one huge storage pool for everything. I rather keep the various functions for storage all distinct. IE WS2012R2 essentials is used for all my home media and backup of PCs. So that is the most important data. My Work related data is stored on external usb3 drive, etc..
Some details.
I have two nodes:
Node 1: E3-12xx CPU with 32GB ram.
VM on it: I run WS2012R2 Essentials with pass through LSI card that is built into the MB and usb 3 card which i use to connect a USB HDD for quartly backups.. The LSI card is flashed in IT mode. I also have a minecraft server, sophos router and vcenter application running on it.
Node 2: Dual E5-26xx with 128GB ram. I have one raid cards and usb 3 card all on pass through. One raid card flashed to IT mode goes to freenas which has some old drives that i share out to linux hosts for storage. The other raid card is used to create a raid for VMs to live on. It has 3 x 3TB Red HDD with a 1GB SSD cache made up of 4 256GB consumer SSD drives in Raid 10. The usb 3 card is pass to a windows 8 VM and has an external 4TB USB Drive that is used for storage.
As for VMs on this server, I have 1 Windows 8 used for work, 1 WS2012R2 used for dev, 1 minecraft server, freenas, pfsense, and about 10 or so ubuntu servers that have various software builds on it ( Websphere, DB2, etc.) these last VMs aren't always on, unless I'm actively working on them.
As for backups. Only node 1 has XSIbackup running on it. When node 2 was setup and I started to use it with out setting up a real backup option. I would like to have some backups of VMs i spent a lot of time installing software on. I been looking at XSIbackup pro for 105 USD and free version of Veeam for backup options to automate it.
Options / Advise
Option 1- If I stay with Vmware, my expense will be 200 for VMUG and possibly the 105 for XSIbackup ( I might go with free version). I can upgrade to version 6.5 (unless someone notes it will break any of the passthrough i listed above.)
option 2- Move everything over to Proxmox. Proxmox seems to have built in backup of VMs. It also seems to be way more hands on then ESXI, especially when it comes to pass through. I played with basics in Virtualbox so I haven't really tried all the pass-through tests.
Option 3 - You guys give me some suggestions.
Let me know what you think.
PS i also though of consolidating down all storage, etc. but i dont feel comfortable having one huge storage pool for everything. I rather keep the various functions for storage all distinct. IE WS2012R2 essentials is used for all my home media and backup of PCs. So that is the most important data. My Work related data is stored on external usb3 drive, etc..