VMware vMotion setup

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I have the following VMware lab setup

- 2x physical servers
- 1x NIC on each physical server
- ESXi loaded on USB devices and installed in each physical server
- 1x hard drive installed in each physical server and is used as a datastore for the VMs
- vCenter installed on a VM on one of the ESXi hosts

I now want to setup vMotion in my lab however from my research it looks like vMotion cannot be setup without shared storage so I wanted to see if there was anyway around this with my current lab setup of 2x servers with local datastores. Would it be possible for example to setup another ESXi host as a VM within one of the physical ESXi hosts which would then mean the hard drive attached would be shared storage for those 2x ESXi hosts?

Any advice would be welcome...

 

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That sounds painful. If you have a sufficiently poky desktop PC you can run an ESXi network inside vmware workstation (30 day trial is free). You can vmote to your heart's content within that.

 

Not an option. Anyone else have any suggestions?

 

It looks like creating a VM and installing Openfiler and configuring could be a solution for my shared storage issue...

 

In the past vMotion required shared storage, however, you can now move both storage and compute at the same time through the web client. This feature is only available with vSphere version 5.1+.

 

Yes I found this information when I was searching. I would still prefer to simulate a shared storage environment and I am going to give Openfiler a try.

 

Good idea.

 

I would suggest FreeNAS over OpenFiler (which is outdated and hasn't been upgraded in a while).

I posted a HowTo on my site here (Configuring FreeNAS 8.3 – iSCSI and NFS Storage for VMware vSphere « Everything Virtual), admittedly it's for 8.3 but the setup for 9 is pretty much similar.

I also posted a couple of videos showing you how to configure OpenFiler 2.99 and vSphere to configure the iSCSI connection, they can be found Configuring Openfiler 2.99 and ESXi to use iSCSI Storage « Everything Virtual, the iSCSI video is obviously cross platform.

Any issues please don't hesitate to ask (btw, if you like the content please vote for my blog - Voting now open for the 2014 Top VMware & Virtualization Blogs | Everything Virtual)

 

Thanks SimonD, I was following a guide I found on YouTube but came across an issue that when I scanned for the iSCSI it wasnt being found, I noticed on your video that you put the IP address in rather than the DNS name when configuring the software storage adapter so I tried the IP address and it worked for me. Im not too sure why the DNS name didnt work or if you need to create a DNS record?

Also on a side note I have the trial version of vSphere installed, after the 60 day period can I just reinstall vSphere and resetup vCenter and go again? Im not sure I will get around to testing everything I want to within the 60 trial period.

 

Yes you need to put a DNS entry in on your local DNS server (Domain Controller?). And yes you can install the trial again after 60 days.

 

Great! I will add a DNS entry in tomorrow and give it a go.

If I reinstall vSphere after it expires will I have to setup everything within vCenter again i.e. the datacentres and add the hosts back in? I assume all the configuration is saved in the SQL database so that will get wiped when I reinstall vSphere?

 

No, you will need to re-install everything, it's all a 60 day trial, delete the DB itself and just create a new one (don't delete the Domain Controller or SQL servers, the rest you're going to have to do again) I would probably suggest the vCenter appliance if I were you.

 

What's the difference between the standard vCenter and vCenter appliance? Is the GUI interface the same?

 

One is a Linux appliance, the other is the Windows based installation, the client interface is the same whether it's the appliance or Windows server. There are some limitations on the appliance (no VUM for example) but for the main the appliance is good enough if you want to just learn.