I am in the process of evaluating vendors for upgrading our existing VMware environment. In a conversation with a provider, he told me that vMotion was not possible without a separate SAN appliance or vSAN (the latter requiring 6+ hosts and expensive licensing).
Under the impression that our 3-host cluster already had vMotion licensing and capability, I tried to "vMotion" a running Windows VM using the vSphere client. I was able to "migrate" both the VM and its disk to a new host and datastore respectively, but nowhere did I see the term "vMotion" in the Recent Tasks log at the bottom of the UI. What I did see there was "Migrating Virtual Machine - Active State" and I was able to maintain an RDC connection and interact with the VM all through the migration process.
My question: Am I misunderstanding the term vMotion? Is it different than migration in an "active state"?
Also, assuming vMotion is an unattended convenience and seeing as we already have an image-level backup solution for our VMs and my company is okay with manually restoring those VMs from a backup (as opposed to the convenience of an "instant," unattended, back-end restoration), is vMotion worth the investment in a dedicated SAN server if we're already capable of "live migration" on demand?
And don't worry about selling me on all the benefits of a SAN. Believe me, I'm already with you on that. The people over here who sign the checks just have different priorities is all.
TWIMC: We're in a 3-host cluster, ESXi 6.0 on all. Enterprise Plus licensing.
vMotion is VMware's branding for being able to migrate powered-on / running Virtual Machines from one ESX/ESXi host to another. vSphere UI does not refer to the actual operation in the UI as vMotion except for a number of places where the branding matters i.e. when configuring a feature called Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) or when enabling vMotion traffic through specific VMkernel virtual network adapter.
On the point about vSAN / physical SAN being mandatory - you already confirmed that you can migrate the VMDKs of a live VM so it's not a complete necessity. The official docs have a section about the limitations of simultaneous comput + storage migration: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.0/com.vmware.vsphere.vcenterhost.doc/GUID-9F1D4A3B-3392-46A3-8720-73CBFA000A3C.html.
I'd bet that migration should be faster if only the memory image of a powered-on VM is migrated - this is especially true in automated DRS setups where VMs are migrated automatically based on a pre-configured policy. Users on reddit seem to have tested this - https://www.reddit.com/r/vmware/comments/matict/vmware_drs_cluster_without_shared_storage_das/gru579m/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3.
Note that I am a VMware employee (albeit not in sales), and you'd probably want a different, unbiased opinion about the product's merits ;)
Related
Since we have a large number of Azure VMs, it is very time-consuming to connect to each machine and manually update software.
Is there a way to do this either automatically or at least centrally for multiple VMs?
For Windows Server 2019 updates, we use our Automation Account for update management.
Thanks for your support.
Nick
As suggested by #joelforysh we can not update automatically.
you can use Mange engine desktop central or SCCM to Schedule the software updates.
Reference
I am new to cloud and still learning GCP, I exhausted almost all my free credit for GCP within 2 months while learning different modules.
GCP is great and provides a lot of things to ease the development and maintenance process.
But I realized using different modules cost me a lot.
So I was wondering if I could have a big VM box, install MySQL, Docker, and Java and React required components by myself, I can achieve pretty much what I want without using extra modules.
Am I right?
Can I use the same VM to host multiple sites by changing ports of API, or do I need to have different boxes for that?
Your question is out of GCP domain but about IT architecture. You can create a big VM with all installed on it. But you have to manage it by yourselves and the scalability is hard.
You can also have 1 VM per website, but the management cost is higher (patching and updgrade)! However you can scale with a better granularity (per website).
The standard pattern today is to explode your monolith server into dedicated services. The database on a specific server, the docker and Java in another one, and the react in a static component (like Google Cloud Platform).
If you want to use VM, you can use GKE and you containerize your application. It's far more easier to maintain your VM with an automatic tool like K8S.
The ultimate step, is to use serverless and/or full managed solution. Cloud SQL for your database, GCS for your static content, and App Engine or Cloud Run for your backend. Like this, you pay as you use and if you website is not very used, you won't be charged on it (except for the database).
I am implementing a very basic dynamic website for a school, where a parent will be able to see the fee due and child's attendance. This service will have on average 30 users per day.
I am exploring different platforms which are cost effective and easy to develop.
Does AWS Lightsail includes dbms(relational or nosql) or I will have to use an RDS instance as well(that will hike the price).
yes, you can check this blog from AWS.
Managed Databases
Today we are making Lightsail even more useful by giving you the
ability to create a managed database with a couple of clicks. This has
been one of our top customer requests and I am happy to be able to
share this news.
This feature is going to be of interest to a very wide range of
current and future Lightsail users, including students, independent
developers, entrepreneurs, and IT managers. We’ve addressed the most
common and complex issues that arise when setting up and running a
database. As you will soon see, we have simplified and fine-tuned the
process of choosing, launching, securing, accessing, monitoring, and
maintaining a database!
But you have few users montly basis as just 30 users as you said, I will suggest to go with LAMP if you are using php
LAMP with PHP 7.x certified by Bitnami greatly simplifies the
development and deployment of PHP applications. It includes the latest
versions of PHP 7.x, Apache and MySQL together with phpMyAdmin and
popular PHP frameworks Zend, Symfony, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Smarty,
and Laravel.
Or if you are using nodejs then with NoSQL you can try with MEAN stack.
MEAN certified by Bitnami provides a complete production environment
for MongoDB and Node.js applications. It includes the latest stable
release of MongoDB, Express, Angular and Node.js. Apart from these
core components, it also includes the latest versions of Apache, Git,
PHP and RockMongo.
Here is screenshot from APP+OS
lightsail-DB-and-instance
I want to deploy 10-15 VMWare hosts to cloudstack. This is my first time working with any type of cloud. I was doing research on installation and architecture, I was stuck on a point that for using VMWare hosts i have to install VCenter server, but i can't do that as it's paid. So, please guide me that is there a way of deploying these VMWare hosts on cloudstack without buying any licensed software.
Unfortunately, CloudStack does not support vSphere/ESXi without vCenter. There were several requests to support vSphere/ESXi without vCenter - however, keep in mind that many features vCenter provides must be implemented in CloudStack and it not an easy task.
If you want to remain open source and or/free, consider using Xen with XenCenter or just go pure KVM. I use to use VMware for most of my career and recently transitions to KVM - it was an easy switch and with no regrets.
CloudStack mailing lists are best to answering any setup questions you might have.
All best
-ilya
By design, vCenter is must for CloudStack to manage & build cloud over VMware ESXi hosts. It would be huge exercise to extend the support to ESXi host management without vCenter, which could be limited in features like live migration, VMware distributed virtual switches, DRS etc.
You might consider switching to XenServer which is free and very well supported seamlessly by CloudStack. Feel free discuss your deployment configuration and planning at users#cloudstack.apache.org or dev#cloudstack.apache.org.
We currently have a single installation multi-site setup, hosted in Europe, and are looking to move content delivery for a single site to China. This is partly for SEO purposes and partly to improve content delivery performance there. Content management performance isn't an issue.
Given that we'll be having to transfer data between two separate hosting companies we'd like to limit both how much gets sent, and if possible not send any data we wouldn't be happy to publish.
We have Sitecore analytics enabled, so this might be a complicating factor.
I've read the scaling guide, which suggests we'll need a minimum of both web and core databases in the new CD environment. They do suggest that if there is no extranet security configured it is possible to do without the core database in a pure CD environment.
Does anyone have any experience with this? What are the benefits/pitfalls? What is the bare minimum installation we can get away with?
Edit: Sitecore.NET 6.4.1 (rev. 111003)
Like divamatrix said, knowing the version number is essential.
But even though the older versions can run without the Core, I would stick to an installation that includes the Core so you will have less trouble upgrading in the future.
What you need on the Content Delivery side is:
Web database
Core database
Analytics database
Then on the Content Management side you need your usual:
Master database
Web database
Core database
Analytics database
Then setup SQL replication between the Core databases.
Analytics can be configure to run reports using data from CD and store them on CM.
You also need to setup Web Deployment for file replication between the instances.
Besides all this you need some extra configuration as is explained in the Scaling Guide.
If you are not using Sitecore 6.4 or higher, I would recommend upgrading first. Once you got this setup properly it will work like a charm!
To answer your question, older versions of Sitecore worked without the Core database. You didn't say which version of Sitecore you're using, but if it's anything current, the answer is going to be that you need a web database and a core database. Also, having analytics enabled is definitely a consideration you need to look at. You should probably look at setting up an your analytics database local to your CD hosting as this database can see a lot of traffic depending on the traffic of your site. You can have publishing set up to either publish to a local web database and then replicate or you can just let publishing should handle the transfer of data between your CM and CD environment.