I work for an 11-person company that has about 8 dedicated (and small by modern standards) servers today. We have decided to replace our aging servers with virtualized servers on a hypervisor platform. We've chosen ESXi 5.1 for this, and have purchased vSphere Server Essentials. We've bought a compute server for the hypervisor and an iSCSI RAID-based storage server. Since we're familiar with VMware desktop products and have used Xen server for one development project, we are familiar with the basic technology, we have practiced an ESXi installation and configuration on test hardware using the evaluation download, and the installation and configuration went smoothly and we created our first test VM using this platform.
Now we have questions--lots of them. Unfortunately it seems that there is no forum specifically for very small installations and their concerns that may be very different from those of larger installations.
So some of my concern are these:
1) Is there a reason why I would want to use vCenter Server? Its installation and configuration seems to be much more complex than that of the hypervisor itself. The vSphere Client seems to be an excellent tool that does everything we would want (although that may be because we haven't really discovered all our needs yet).
2) We would like individuals who manage particular virtual servers to be presented with just the tools to manage those particular servers. The vSphere Console window is pretty much what we'd like to present to the virtual server manager. However, the only way we see to run the console on a particular server is to use the vSphere client that has management capabilities for the hypervisor and the entire collection of virtual machines. Is there any way to restrict control to just a particular VM, and give access to its console anywhere on our LAN?
3) We have no idea whether we are configuring our iSCSI storage in a way that makes sense. Since today we have just one client (initiator) for our storage server (target), we made the available storage into one big target (it's about 9TB) and we give each VM a partition on that storage. In particular we are concerned about backup and about, eventually, adding a second compute server and hypervisor.
4) Of course a major concern we have is backup. Right now we don’t have a particularly good backup strategy in general, although we do have a good strategy for key files. What’s a good (and economical) way to do backup in this small environment? Cost is important. We are planning to have all the VM definitions and virtual disks on the storage server. How do we backup the small remaining configuration information for the hypervisor?
5) Importing the physical servers is a concern. Most of our servers are old and/or unsupported versions of Windows Server or Linux. How possible is it just manually import and re-configure such servers?
These are just some of the questions we have right now. I’ve been wearing out the search box, but I haven’t yet gotten good insights on these particular issues for such a small installation as ours. Thanks for any help.