Smoothwall Firewall project

Saturday 4 April 2009

Using VMware workstation on Ubuntu to manage your ESX environment

The perceived wisdom in VMware circles is that the machine that handles your ESX server licenses and management virtual centre should be installed onto a normal server with a copy of a Microsoft OS installed.
In an effort to leverage ever last once out of my virtualized infrastructure , I decide the other day to install the network components of my ESX setup on a windows XP virtual image on my desktop. The installation went without a hitch, and once the license server was up and running I was able to log into the management software, via the virtual centre client without a hitch. Now this was on a quad core workstation, and I only used the built in SQL database for the management software instead of a full oracle or MSSQL database, but it is running extremely well with Ubuntu as the host operating system for VMware workstation.

I would not recommend this obviously for a large data centre implementation, but for testing or a small implementation this works a treat, and it also saves using another PC and Ubuntu is an excellent host for the setup.

2 comments:

Jeff said...

I'm doing something similar in OS X using Fusion for managing ESX, but I've also got a WinXP VM on the ESX server itself to manage vRanger Pro backups. Kind of amusing, since it backs up itself! Everything dumps off to a 4TB NAS.

Codfather said...

Yes, it's funny once you really get into virtualization the possibilities become very interesting. I think my next step is to use a KVM virtual image to manage it , as I believe it will have more performance, I will see.