We have 4 server blades and each one of them has ESXi on it (3 x 6.5 and 1 x 6.0).
There is a vCenter Appliance on one of the 6.5 that manages all 4 ESXi servers.
The problem is that, for now at least, we only have HDDs for 2 of them. The other have some default SSDs with 300GB each (way too small for our dev and test purposes).
Now, what I was thinking was to find a way so that the storage space (HDDs from first 2 servers) will be shared with all 4 ESXis. Meaning, to have a VM running on CPU/RAM on servers 3 or 4, but the disk to be located on a datastore from server 1 or 2.
I know that this is possible by using 3rd party software (found about 3PAR or StoreVirtual), and maybe vSAN, but due to project constraints this is not an option.
Is there any way to achieve this out-of-box? Any directions / hints / links / anything is highly appreciated.
Without the ability to use 3rd party software or vSAN, there's nothing else left available.
If cost is the issue, there are free options like openfiler or freenas that could help out. However, keep in mind that you'd need an openfiler/freenas instance on each of the systems with the hard drives... In the end you'd end up with 2 iSCSI or NFS mounts, one from each host.
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I've been tasking with creating a Minecraft server for about 500 players. I've never create a Minecraft server this large before and I think the best way to go about it is (how I've done all my other servers) with Google Cloud. Google Cloud has the following VM options:
I'm thinking about ~100MB per player to be on the safe side, so that's about 50 GB, so I'd say the n2-highmem-8 is probably a good VM to use. Is this overkill? Underkill?
Also, I know that a MC server can't use Multiple CPUs at the same time, so is it a waste paying for 8 Virtual CPUs?
Thanks!
For 500 players, I would recommend a minimum of 6 vCore and 32 GB or more.
You're right with Minecraft mainly using only one thread, so a high CPU Clock speed is most valuable. Also, I would recommend using PaperMC, it's a custom-made better performing Minecraft Server software. Here could you get different server versions if you do not want to use 1.15.2 Minecraft.
Maybe you should look around for different Servers, near your location. I bet you can find something less expensive and with higher Core clocks.
Minecraft has FREE servers in the launcher
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I am beginner in VMware. I am trying to understand the VMware components and how it works.But I could not understand how vsphere Client access the EXSi host. Is it directly or through the VMWare VCenter server.please give any reference or explanation to get the understanding.
Using vSphere client you can connect to vCenter or directly to host. Of course if host is added to vCenter you should to connect ONLY to vCenter because vCenter should to know about any changes made on hosts. Connecting directly to host should be done ony in emergency situations (e.g. vCenter is down).
V-Center is the umbrella, under which all EXSI can be controlled. We can assume an example of a company where we have 3 physical servers installed ESXi on it and each server has as many processors cores so it can handle 5 virtual machines on it.
Now What is EXSi ---- EXSI is the product/OS/kernel which will allow you to create the environment to run multiple Servers/OS on the same hardware.
V-sphere client/V-sphere Web client --- If you have only one EXSI Server and you want to control that server functionality you need v-sphere because taking direct connection of EXSI Hardware machine will not allow you to do much with it. so the v-sphere client will give you many tools to play with it.
V-Center/VC ----- Now what if when your company has many ESXi servers as we taken for example. V-Sphere can not control all of those into one centralized platform. Here VC comes into play. VC allow you to manage all of these servers under one tool and many other functionalities which are not available in V-Sphere like Distribution switch, V-Motion(Which allow you to migrate one VM machine from Hardware to hardware in the fluctuation of time or not human noticeable time ).
Currently we are running a VMWare Server on a Windows Server 2008 R2. The hardware specs of the machine are very good. Nonetheless, performance in virtual machines is not at all acceptable when two or more virtual machines are running at the same time (just running, not performing any CPU or disk intensive tasks).
Hence we are looking for alternatives. VMWare's website is full of buzz words only, I cannot figure out if they provide a product fitting our requirements. But alternatives from other suppliers are also welcome.
There are some constraints:
The virtualization product must run on Windows 2008 R2 - the server will not be virtualized (hence esx is excluded)
Many Virtual Machines already exist. They must be usable with the new system, or the conversion process must be simple
The virtualization engine must be able to run without an interactive user session (hence VMWare Player and VirtualBox are excluded)
It must be possible to reset a machine to a snapshot and to start a machine via command line from a different (i.e. not the host) machine (something like the vmrun command)
Several machines must be able to run in parallel without causing an enormous drop in performance
Do you have some hints for that?
Have you considered Hyper-V (native hypervisor in Windows)?
However I would suggest troubleshooting the performance issues (the most common is not enough RAM for VM or host - which result in paging and poor performance)
Though I could not find a real alternative to VMWare Server with the constraints given, I could at least speed the performance up:
changing the disk policies from "Optimize for safety" to "Optimize for performance" reduced the time of most build projects by a third
installing IP version 6 protocol on the XP machines typically brought another 10%
The slowest integation testing project (installation of Dragon Naturally Seaking 12) is now done in 20 minutes instead of 2h20min.
Still, when copying larger files from the host to the virtual machine, performance is inacceptable - while copying them from a different VM on the same host works far better...
I would still consider esxi and 2008 on top of that if i would be in your place.
We used vmware server and performance is simply not comparable to esxi especially if you are using IO intensive applications.
Does anyone have a good way to set up multiple CFML engines, and versions of them, together in a suitable environment for cross testing a CFML based application.
Ideally, I'd like this to be Ubuntu Server based as I'm using it with VirtualBox (under Windows 7). Plus it'd be helpful if it was possible to switch between, so my laptop can cope with one at a time rather than all running at once. I'm thinking of the following:
Adobe ColdFusion 9
Adobe ColdFusion 10
Railo 3.3.x
Railo 4.x
OpenBD 2.x
I'd also like to get them serving from the same shared directory, so I don't have to have a copy of the code for each engine. Cheers
You mentioned being able to "switch between, so my laptop can cope with one at a time rather than all running at once", I'm guessing that you are thinking that each one will run on a different VM, or that they might require a huge amount of memory. I don't think you need to worry about that. Unless you require that they be on different machines, I think you could do this all on one VM and with one instance of a servlet container (like Tomcat).
From a high-level view, here is how I would do it.
Install Tomcat
Create or download .wars for each of the engines.
Deploy said .wars to that one instance of Tomcat
Set up Tomcat to use each of those servlets from a different host name (server.xml)
Create a code directory outside of Tomcat for your one copy of the code
Set up a Symbolic link in each webapp to link the code folder into the servlet
You should then be able to hit the same source from each engine by visiting the different host names in the browser.
I may be missing something. It has been a long time since I set something like this up. You'll likely need to make a bunch of tweaks (JVM settings, switching to Sun/ORACLE JVM vs. OpenJDK, etc).
I don't think running this many engines will cause you great trouble. In my experiences, for development, I have had 3 instances of CF9 running on Tomcat using only 189mb of RAM. And each additional instance did not increase that number by 1/3. Far less. It would not surprise me if you could run all of those handily with less than 512md of RAM. Possibly even 256mb if you are really hurting on memory.
I hope this helps.
For ColdFusion 10, Railo and OpenBD you would be looking at deploying with standalone installations of Tomcat, Jetty or JBoss.
ColdFusion 9, probably the easiest solution is "Enterprise Multiserver configuration" setup.
With these kinds of installation they are pretty much platform agnostic.
The things to be aware of are the web server, proxy and jndi ports that are used by each installation, but only if you want to run more than one server at a time.
After that it's whether you are bothered about proxying from apache or Nginx to the server instances and the connector you want to use.
No idea if this helps...
Since you've mentioned the VirtualBox, I'll share my personal approach to this task. It includes few fairly simple steps:
Install Ubuntu Server as VirtualBox guest (host is also Ubuntu).
Set up only basic software like JVM and updates. Set up virtual
machine networking as bridged adapter to use my Wi-Fi connection.
Configure my Wi-Fi router DHCP to assign static IP for MAC address of the virtual machine.
Add entry to my (host) system hosts: ip_assigned_to_vm virtual.ubuntu
Set up guest additions and mount my ~/www directory inside the machine to access web applications.
Now, when I need another machine for experiments, or some other configuration of software (I've tested ACF 10 and Railo 4 this way) I do two things:
Clone existing clean machine.
Make sure it is using the same MAC address with bridged interface.
That's it.
It doesn't matter which of the machines I run, they all can be accessed as http://virtual.ubuntu (of course, it requires proper web-server configuration on the guest). Same time they are independent and it is completely safe to make anything I wish and test anything that runs on Ubuntu.
Obvious downsides are that I can run just one machine at a time, plus much more disk space is used. Not a problem to me.
I've tried approach with Tomcat and multiple WARs, but it has couple of issues: I can't use different JVM and Tomcat settings, also if I screw the setup -- all the Tomcat hosts are down.
Hope this helps.
We have 3 identical HP DL380 G5 server here, one of them is running vmware-server with one VM running on it.
I've begun the process to migrate these systems to be running ESXi (the $0, "embedded" system); two of the physical machines will have %99.99 of the time exactly 1 VM, the other will have 2.
For this, the major advantage I get Disaster Recovery ability. Our tape backup system doesn't have a "bare metal" ability. I can manually copy VM images to a different server, however. Even if they are months old, they provide pretty-close-to-instant up, further recovery they would be from tape.
Being the free version, I don't get the VMWare "consolidated backup" or VMotion. And I need to do per-physical machine management. But the ESXi takes 32MB of disk, and it specifically supports the server.
With that in mind, is there any reason not to always use ESXi, if the hardware supports it? Even if you only are planning on running 1 VM on that hardware?
Well, in your case ESXi is the better choice. There are cases where you want to use VMware Server but not really for this case. This is what ESXi is for. For instance, I use VMware Server on top of my development OS so I could do testing and use different distro's etc. I wouldn't do VMware Server for a production server like you are describing, but ESXi would be the best choice.
Is it an excellent idea to virtualize the whole OS to get the ability to make backups? NO! its not... Damn hype to virtualize without the real need for it.
There are free alternatives to make backups of pretty much any OS, image or archive of your choice.
To be more precise, XSIBackup will allow you to hot backup any ESXi edition from version 5.1 and up, it backs up the guest OS while it is running, and can even transfer it to a secondary ESXi box via IP and leave it ready to be switched on:
https://33hops.com/xsibackup-vmware-esxi-backup.html