Questions regarding VUM in a VCP5 lab

I'm going through Chapter 4 Master vSphere, and have a couple of questions for the vets.

My first and foremost question is if VUM is really necessary for a VCP5 lab in peoples opinions? I'm going through Chapter 4 Master vSphere, and it's saying that if VUM is installed on the vCenter server, a minimum of 4GB should be used. Being that I already dedicated 4GB RAM to the vCenter server in my nested lab, should it be ready to rock with installing VUM?

I'm getting close to pegging my RAM with all the virtual goodness going on in my nested lab, so need to spare those resources where I can

Thanks!

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Essendon

I'd definitely poke around with VUM, for sure. When I was doing the VCP, I had them both on the same VM, just not the same database. Both had their databases on the same VM too. Sure 4GB wasnt quick, but if you are constrained for resources then go ahead. You could spare some RAM here and there, do you mind telling us how much RAM other VM's have been allocated? I'd like to know because I've seen/heard of people allocating 4GB RAM to their DC's, when really only 512MB is needed.

Asif Dasl

In no way would I consider myself a vet but I'll chime in... I would install it so you can upgrade a host from 5.5 to 5.5 U1. VUM is tiny, I manged to get SRM installed on a 4 GB of RAM vCenter Server as well, so VUM as a plugin should be no problem to you.

ande0255

My RAM allocation is as follows:

ESXi 1 & ESXi 2 = 4GB each = 8GB total
vCenter Server = 4GB
DC Server = 512MB
OpenFiler Storage = 512MB

So that's 13GB out of 16GB, but they obviously don't fully consume those resources yet as they are mainly sitting idle - Does that seem right? I'm kind of starting to wonder how in the world I'm going to afford to put RAM on a couple VM's per ESXi host to play with features at this rate!

Thanks for the insight, mucho appreciated!

tstrip007

You're nested using workstation right? How do you have your virtual networks setup? Bridged would have to be used in this case so vum can see the upstream update server right?

ande0255

I haven't gotten around to the networking part yet, that will be upcoming in my next chapter. As of right now, all my VM's are NAT'ing to my host connection, and all VM's are able to reach the internet through that NAT network.

tprice5

16gb ram?
Nested?

Time to upgrade, friend.

ande0255

I have been considering an upgrade, but after consideration I believe I can squeeze by with 16GB RAM for VCP studies. At an idle state, 2 ESXi hosts + vCenter + DC + OpenFiler VM runs at about 9.5GB, so there is some wiggle room there.

I think my next step up will be building a super charged desktop that I can easily swap components, which I want to have rocking by the time I get to NP Voice, as I'd like to really go to town with virtualization of r&s along with UC servers.

So for right now I'm just going to dynamically balance the RAM situation for VCP studies, and hopefully VUM doesn't peg my vCenter server

Asif Dasl

ande0255 wrote: »

I'm kind of starting to wonder how in the world I'm going to afford to put RAM on a couple VM's per ESXi host to play with features at this rate!

Even though ESXi 5.5 requires 4GB you should still be able to run a Server 2012 instance with 1GB of RAM without it falling over. vMotion should be possible with that. If you need more than 1GB then you'll need a 32GB machine. You might need a 32GB machine when vSphere 6 is released anyways but I see you are on the lookout for a new setup.

J.Tot

Asif Dasl wrote: »

Even though ESXi 5.5 requires 4GB you should still be able to run a Server 2012 instance with 1GB of RAM without it falling over. vMotion should be possible with that. If you need more than 1GB then you'll need a 32GB machine. You might need a 32GB machine when vSphere 6 is released anyways but I see you are on the lookout for a new setup.

You can go lower on the 2012
Convert to server core or minwin for ever lower requirements. 2012 standard needs around 512-720mb to boot correctly 100% of the time.

ande0255

A 2008 DC actually boots and runs smooth with 512mb, aside from initial setup being a bit slow, I don't really work from the DC. With VUM running on the vCenter server, it is running pretty steadily at 3.98GB RAM now, but does run smoothly albeit pegging all available RAM.

Essendon

Yeah the guys are right. The VM's running on the nested hosts can run quite happily on 512MB RAM, or you can go lower still with Server 2003. You arent doing much on those VM's anyways. So if your vESXi hosts have 4GB RAM, you can 2-3 VM's on each without noticing anything really. Play around with limits and stuff too, quite interesting to see how things work then.

Asif Dasl

J.Tot wrote: »

You can go lower on the 2012
Convert to server core or minwin for ever lower requirements. 2012 standard needs around 512-720mb to boot correctly 100% of the time.

Sure, I just saying that you could run something up to a Gig of RAM inside the ESXi host. I give it a Gig to keep it snappy but you could run it off 512 too. As Essendon says above it doesn't really matter what the OS is, you are not really focusing on that and moreso on vSphere.

jibbajabba

When I had a nested lab on my laptop for presentations, I just had a couple of Linux VMs at 512MB of RAM. The installer wouldn't go into graphic mode unless you got 600something, but you could just give it 1GB of RAM and then lower it once installed (CentOS that is).

You coulud even run "Damn Small Linux" - that just needs 128MB of RAM. No need to be a Linux wizard as all you really need is network (ok and stuff to install VMware Tools) .. To basically fire up a ping and see what happens when you pull the plug / migrate etc.

Also, what is the base system running ? You can always combine your host system to use as AD / SAN etc.

ande0255

I am currently running Windows 8.1 64-bit as the native OS. I actually hadn't even considered that the VM's are created on the ESXi host itself, and consumes the RAM dedicated to that host, rather adding VM's additional resources at the host level and attaching them to the hosts - shows how much ground I have to cover in my studies

SimonD.

VUM as a product is always worth knowing, it's more limited these days now that it's limited to VMware infrastructure, we use a dedicated VUM repo with the three vCenter servers running VUM on them to get their patch repos from, great for adding additional patching requirements as well (drivers, OMSA etc).

You can run pretty restricted VM's in your lab, I would probably go down the route of an SSD for them than be concerned over ram allocation.