Benefits of SAN/NAS with a v3.0 + lab

dentry

I know very little of SAN/NAS systems. I was speaking with a coworker on the SAN team and he mentioned that when a lab enviorment is backed up to a SAN and that SAN is connected to the ESXI box when the ESXI box goes invalid after 30 days becuase of licensing all that is needed is a reboot of the ESXI server and the ESXI server will auto recognize objects backed up the SAN. Then the lab is up and running after a simple reboot and the ESXI box is good for another 30 days. If I am completely off base please let me know. If you use NAS/SAN in a different method I am interested in those thoughts. Thank you.

pitviper

You probably won’t find much help circumventing licensing around here.

I checked this out recently and the free version of ESXi is more than adequate for a lab environment. You just have to register for a free key that’s good for 2 CPU sockets per host (varies depending on version), up to 32GB RAM (again might be different in 5.5), and no expiration.

dentry

Nice, I'm assuming I can get this at the ESXI homepage ?

pitviper

dentry wrote: »

Nice, I'm assuming I can get this at the ESXI homepage ?

Try here:

https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/evalcenter?p=free-esxi5&lp=default