Hardware vs Virtual: best choice?
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With the free version of ESXi if you lose power, when power is restored and your Hyper Visor is rebooted your VMs won't start automatically. This could potentially be a problem (What if you are not home) unless someone has figured something out here. I am running Cisco Call Manager in a VM and this is a problem that I have. My Fix was to put my ESXi server on an UPs to tolerate temporary power outages.
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With the free version of ESXi if you lose power, when power is restored and your Hyper Visor is rebooted your VMs won't start automatically. This could potentially be a problem (What if you are not home) unless someone has figured something out here.
I'm running the free version of ESXi 5.1 and the VM's start automatically. See the attached image for auto start up….
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With the router, virtual is better for reliability, but physical is better for security.
There are no known security issues in the vlan implementation in either linux kernel or the openvswitch add-on (which I use for my virtual routers), however, despite the fact that there are no known security issues, there are inarguably more devices connected to the same physical ports. This is a moot point most of the time, but if a compromise is ever found and the vlan and bridging stack you're using is ever compromised, you may have problems.
Conversely, with a Virtual router, you can easily migrate your router away from faulty hardware, or add an additional node to compensate for growth. You can easily add an additional failover peer for each physical host you have hosting VMs and connected to your core switches. Migration and management are much easier when nearly everything is virtual. virtual pfsensei allows you to run multiple identical systems for failover, load balancing, etc. on heterogenous underlying hardware.
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With the free version of ESXi if you lose power, when power is restored and your Hyper Visor is rebooted your VMs won't start automatically. This could potentially be a problem (What if you are not home) unless someone has figured something out here.
I'm running the free version of ESXi 5.1 and the VM's start automatically. See the attached image for auto start up….
Thanks for the tip Priller! I don't know how I missed that one. It's my understanding that if you wanted to import/export a copy of your virtual machine you need the paid version of ESXi is this correct? With Hyper-V this is included albeit Hyper-V is not free. When I was using Citrix Xen Server all the features were free, I would have stuck with it if I didn't have stability issues. I haven't played with Xen Server for a minute now.
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It's my understanding that if you wanted to import/export a copy of your virtual machine you need the paid version of ESXi is this correct?
With the free version (using 5.1) you can import/export the OVA or OVF of any virtual machine … from the "File" drop-down menu in the vSphere client. No restrictions that I'm aware of.
I periodically export my VM's to have a backup. Likewise, I have created new VM's from a OVA.
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Excellent thread I was debating about how much better it is and more reliable for using a hardware pfsense solution over Vmware, however listening to the pros….. why not make full use of the hardware its more green and easier and saves leccy.
I Have a question since I have not tried ESXi 5 before, ill get 5.1 as per the advise before. I have managed to get my pfsense on my hardware configured and working 100% and it took 2 months to get it done !
Is it possible to make a snapshot or image of it and then simply import the image once ESXi is installed?
I do not want to install pfsense and go through the settings all over again, or can I just restore the hardware pfsense settings onto the ESXi>pfsense virtual instance ?
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It's my understanding that if you wanted to import/export a copy of your virtual machine you need the paid version of ESXi is this correct?
With the free version (using 5.1) you can import/export the OVA or OVF of any virtual machine … from the "File" drop-down menu in the vSphere client. No restrictions that I'm aware of.
I periodically export my VM's to have a backup. Likewise, I have created new VM's from a OVA.
You can use the VMWARE Converter tool. It can clone a physical to Virtual. Clone from ESXI to VMWare Workstation or vice versa.
https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/info/slug/infrastructure_operations_management/vmware_vcenter_converter_standalone/5_5 or
https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/info/slug/infrastructure_operations_management/vmware_vcenter_converter_standalone/5_1