Presentation by Jason Whitaker, Transylvania University, at the 2010 AIKCU Technology Symposium.

1. Getting More For Less From VMware How the indigent can still benefit from virtualization Jason Whitaker Transylvania University

2. vSphere 4 Enterprise, 1 processor, up to 256GB memory, 1 year production support = $3,600 vanilla online purchase price Your important production environments may need HA, VMotion, etc, but not everything is “important”… Test environments, tools, other “low impact” virtual machines may not need all of the bells and whistles VMware is great, but it costs money!

3. ESXi is the bare bones virtualization offering It’s FREE! No HA, VMotion, templates… …but it does do snapshots, memory over-commitment, NIC teaming, HBA multipathing, and has a vCLI… all of the nice features of VMware You can deploy an appliance to ESXi, so it makes a great testing ground, or you can make appliances of your own VMs with Converter Enter VMware ESXi

4. There are not-so-pricey VM software offerings out there, so you can get more functionality out of ESXi Check out www.trilead.com and look at their “VMX” VM Explorer product – allows you to make snapshot backups of your ESXi VMs Check out www.veeam.com and look at their FastSCP product – lets you copy files to and from ESXidatastores More for ESXi

5. VMware Essentials and Essentials Plus packages can add some of the high end features Essentials gives you three licenses of ESXi or ESX with vCenter agent, vStorage API/VCB, vCenter server for Essentials for $995 – so you can manage ESXi deployments in one vCenter, and use backup products that require vStorage API such as vRanger Essentials Plus adds HA and Data Recovery, but the price jumps up Need more? No problem!

6. Getting More For Less From VMware How the indigent can still benefit from virtualization Jason Whitaker Transylvania University