Conveniently ESXi includes a way to increase the size of a virtual hard disk. However, like everything else in ESXi it is neither easy to find nor easy to make work. To save you the effort, here’s how to do it. First, you need to delete any and all snapshots. It won’t work if you have any snapshots. (Don’t worry, deleting them just merges them into the flat disk and deletes the deltas. You won’t lose any information.)
If you have snapshots on the virtual drive you can tell ESXi to make the change. ESXi tells you it resized the disk but it never actually does it. (It doesn’t give an error message, it just doesn’t work). I’d recommend shutting down your VM just in case, though you’re supposed to be able to do it to a live VM the thought is a bit scary for me.
Go to your VM’s Getting Started page in Infrastructure Client and click on “Edit virtual machine settings”. On the left side, there’s an option that says “Hard Disk” and a number. Click that. That brings up this menu:
VMWare ESXi Properties Menu. VHD Settings
On the right, you’ll notice that you can adjust the disk capacity. You can make the drive larger (or smaller) as needed by adjusting the New Size tab. It’s not recommended that you mess with any of the other settings as changing them can confuse your operating system and prevent it from booting. That’s it. You’re done, now you just need to resize the partition so that your OS can make use of the new space.
(While it may seem like I’ve been bashing ESXi, it really is a great product. Once you get it running and figure out its quirks it’s one of the best virtualization solutions around. And it’s free. For what more can you ask?)
I’ve recently been playing around with VMware’s ESX 3i server virtualization system. So far, my feelings are rather mixed. It’s not particularly easy to get running, and beyond that, it’s not particularly easy to use. However, once you get past that, you’ll see the power of a low-level virtualization system.
I have a lot of experience with VMware Server 2.0, which is far easier to install and configure. Just run the executable on your favorite Windows or Linux system. I’d recommend Linux because it has lower base requirements. One of the things I liked about Server is the web based interface for managing the VMs. ESXi makes you download the VMware Infrastructure Client to manage the server and its VMs. Now, that’s not bad, but I like the web interface better. It feels nicer.
I’ve not had any luck getting my VMware Server machines to run on ESXi. For me, that was the killer. I spent some time trying to get it to see those VMs. I copied them to the datastore, tried setting up new machines pointing to the VHD, however that didn’t work because it wouldn’t find the VHD. All in all, it was a painful process. I gave up after a couple of hours.
ESXi seems to be a really powerful engine. That’s one thing it has going for it. It’s also free, that’s another huge thing. It also has a really steep learning curve. That being said, if you want the highest performance for your virtual servers, and you can deal with the learning curve, go for ESXi. If you just want it to work without a lot of trouble, go for Server.
A few years ago, VMWare released VMWare Server at no charge to customers. VMWare Server v. 1 had demanding requirements to run on Windows. You needed a Windows Server machine configured with IIS and ASP.NET. You no longer need Windows Server, nor do you need IIS. You can run Server 2 on any NT based system including all versions of XP.
VMWare Server is certainly nothing new, but I’ve only recently started dabbling in the world of virtualization. There are two types of server virtualization systems. One is hypervisor based and runs as its own operating system. The other is software based and runs on top of another operating system. VMWare Server is the latter type. It can run on any NT based Windows system or any recent Linux kernel. There are several differences. Hypervisor based systems generally run better. They’re more efficient and use less resources to run the VM software. However, software based systems have their advantages. You don’t need to dedicate a server to run your VMs on; you can run them on any Windows or Linux based systems.
Server virtualization systems are not like desktop virtualization systems. They are optimized for services that are mission critical and that need to run whenever the system is on. Desktop virtualization systems, such as Parallels or VMWare Workstation, generally don’t have options to start the VM when the system starts, whereas the server virtualization systems.
VMWare server provides a web based interface to manage the VMs. There is no need to install a client (except an Active-X plugin or Firefox extension for remote console). I personally liked this. When compared with VMWare’s hypervisor based solution ESX, this for me, is a huge advantage. I like being able to control the virtual servers from wherever I am without needing to install client software. For me, neither is a huge deal since I have my laptop everywhere, but the convenience is still nice.
All in all, I really like VMWare Server as a virtualization solution for consolidating servers. Check back later for an article on ESX 3i