The SAN I’m using is currently limited to 16 hosts. One of which is a physical server already up and running on it. Another would be the physical VMware box. That would leave 14 connections for virtual machines. I’ll subtract another one out for the redundant physical box. That leaves 13 machines I could put on the SAN. Note: I’ve got a MD3000i SAN that is currently limited to 16 hosts, regardless of whether or not they are physical or virtual.

That is all fine and planned for. However could I setup more virtual machines that are hosted on the physical servers internal hard drives? I would loose VMmotion ability and all of that because they aren’t on the SAN, but for these boxes that isn’t an issue (test boxes). Or is it a case of all or nothing (either all on the SAN or none)?

Also, when talking about 2 physical boxes and less than 20 virtual machines…..is Virtual Center worth the extra cost? What exactly does Virtual Center provide beyond management tools that scale much better than the default tools that ship with ESX?

Submitted by a User