VMWare.. some questions..

[ibex333]

When an employer is looking for someone with VMWare experience, what exact skills in VMWare are they usually looking for?

I understand it's a difficult question because they can be looking for all sorts of skills, but I am looking to find out what are the "most common/basic" uses of WMWare in business/corporate setting. (without getting into vSphere, vCloud and ESX Server)

I had a chance to play around with VMWare a little. It's neat to be able to run Mac OS, or any other OS in a virtual setting, and VMWare also allows to interconnect virtual PCs which makes it easy to learn client/server skills.

But I cannot see how/why VMWare is in so much demand and why people say it cuts business costs, and makes people more productive. It doesn't matter how many virtual machines you are running on a single computer! There's only so many of them you can work with simultaneously due to screen real estate and human attention span.

I tried looking up VMWare Certs to get an understanding on which skills are required to say "I know VMWare" but there is just too many certs and I cannot make sense of any of it.

Which VMWare cert is a "beginner" one? The very first step?


Is this stuff even worth learning as far as increasing chances of getting a job in IT?

 

[pauldun170]

I'll start the conversation but hopefully others can finish it up. Have a tight schedule today

Allow me to begin with this
Servers, young man..
Servers..

 

[ultimatebob]

Most businesses want someone with experience with VMWare ESX/ESXi, and vSphere.

Keep in mind that businesses use it for server consolidation, and they would rather have one piece of physical hardware running 8 VM's (for example) instead of having 8 physical servers taking up rack space, generating heat, and taking up power.

It also helps with test environments, as you can easily rollback changes to an earlier VM snapshot if you screw something up.

 

[ibex333]

Most businesses want someone with experience with VMWare ESX/ESXi, and vSphere.

Keep in mind that businesses use it for server consolidation, and they would rather have one piece of physical hardware running 8 VM's (for example) instead of having 8 physical servers taking up rack space, generating heat, and taking up power.

It also helps with test environments, as you can easily rollback changes to an earlier VM snapshot if you screw something up.

But a single machine has only so much processing power/storage/memory. It's not like you can Virtualize 8 servers on 1 machine and have it perform the duties of all of them in every way, shape and form... Is it? If you have 8 physical servers it makes sense to me that you would STILL have much more memory and more processing power as opposed to 8 virtualized servers, no?

 

[Nothinman]

When an employer is looking for someone with VMWare experience, what exact skills in VMWare are they usually looking for?

I understand it's a difficult question because they can be looking for all sorts of skills, but I am looking to find out what are the "most common/basic" uses of WMWare in business/corporate setting. (without getting into vSphere, vCloud and ESX Server)

I had a chance to play around with VMWare a little. It's neat to be able to run Mac OS, or any other OS in a virtual setting, and VMWare also allows to interconnect virtual PCs which makes it easy to learn client/server skills.

But I cannot see how/why VMWare is in so much demand and why people say it cuts business costs, and makes people more productive. It doesn't matter how many virtual machines you are running on a single computer! There's only so many of them you can work with simultaneously due to screen real estate and human attention span.

I tried looking up VMWare Certs to get an understanding on which skills are required to say "I know VMWare" but there is just too many certs and I cannot make sense of any of it.

Which VMWare cert is a "beginner" one? The very first step?


Is this stuff even worth learning as far as increasing chances of getting a job in IT?

The VCP is what you want and yes, virtualization is pretty much a requirement in IT. You can look at Citrix Xen or Hyper-V if you want, but VMware is still the industry standard right now.

VMware Workstation is great for desktop stuff, I use it on Linux every day. But ESXi, vSphere, vCenter, etc is what you need for a business. And they'll need you to know how the networking works, storage (e.g. iSCSI and NFS), vMotion, storage vMotion, CPU and memory allocation, resource pools, resource shares, configuration profiles, etc. Just look at what the VCP entails and you'll get an idea of what you need to know.

 

[seepy83]

But a single machine has only so much processing power/storage/memory. It's not like you can Virtualize 8 servers on 1 machine and have it perform the duties of all of them in every way, shape and form... Is it? If you have 8 physical servers it makes sense to me that you would STILL have much more memory and more processing power as opposed to 8 virtualized servers, no?

There is a tremendous amount of resource waste when you use only physical servers. I've got 30 virtual servers running on a high-availability vSphere/ESXi cluster of 3 physical servers with all of the storage on a SAN and have not experienced performance problems. That's the same story that you'll get from basically every organization that has moved towards VMware or another hypervisor...just change the # of servers/VMs to scale to the organization's size.

You don't only reduce power and cooling requirements and the amount of physical racks/U's required in the datacenter...at the same time you are making your infrastructure much more flexible. New servers can be deployed in minutes or hours (right-click --> Deploy from template) instead of weeks or months (purchase approval, ordering, waiting for shipment, racking/cabling, configuring, etc). It makes life a lot easier for your sys admins/engineers, and has a ton of potential to protect against or help you recover faster from unexpected down-time/outages.

 

[mvbighead]

But a single machine has only so much processing power/storage/memory. It's not like you can Virtualize 8 servers on 1 machine and have it perform the duties of all of them in every way, shape and form... Is it? If you have 8 physical servers it makes sense to me that you would STILL have much more memory and more processing power as opposed to 8 virtualized servers, no?

Server A - One dual core Xeon with 4gb of ram and 100GB of RAID 10 disk space. - $4000

Server B - Two Eight core Xeons with 64GB of RAM and 800GB of RAID 10 disk space. - $8000

You can take the workload of server A and duplicate it 8 times at a cost of just double that of server A. Add in rack space, electricity, and other things, and you can see where cost gets cut significantly in virtual form. Throw in shared storage and other things, and you have added high availability, high mobility which allows easier hardware upgrades, etc. Not to mention, if you really must keep an old app going, migrating a VM to a new host is easy (as is adding more memory, CPU, etc.).

Generally speaking, many server applications don't need all the horsepower that even server A provides. They sit there 95% idle doing their mundane little task all day long. Those servers are ideal to be virtualized, and that generally accounts for a good majority of servers.

High I/O, processor intensive, and other similar type servers are generally best left unvirtualized. But these are generally less common than others, depending upon the industry.

Long story short, server B can likely have about 16+ servers that can be moved, modified, re-created, etc. at a very low cost. If you want the same amount of physical servers, you're looking at a pretty good price tag (16x4000 = 64000).

 

[ibex333]

Hm... This is interesting stuff!

Can someone please explain to me why someone would even need server type hardware for something like this? Provided we are dealing with a small business in need of 2 servers, can those be virtualized on a simple current gen i7 PC with lots of ram and storage space?

Am I missing something here?

Also, is vSphere essential for this or VMWare workstation could do the same?

 

[Nothinman]

Hm... This is interesting stuff!

Can someone please explain to me why someone would even need server type hardware for something like this? Provided we are dealing with a small business in need of 2 servers, can those be virtualized on a simple current gen i7 PC with lots of ram and storage space?

Am I missing something here?

Also, is vSphere essential for this or VMWare workstation could do the same?

You want server hardware for quality, warranty and support from VMware.

For 2 servers, I would have a difficult time justifying it. I believe you get at least 1 or 2 included VM licenses with Windows servers so as long as you give the physical server enough memory you could make the second server a VM within Hyper-V and be done with it.

A slightly bigger server running the free version of ESXi and the vSphere client for management would work ok, but feels like overkill for 2 VMs to me. But it would make growth simpler as you could just add another VM or another host to accommodate additional VMs.

You could probably make Workstation do it, but that's not what it's designed for.