Advantages for two Hypervisor servers

[Catsrules]

Are there any any advantages to have two Hypervisor servers? Like can I setup a fail over or combine the two servers in to one

[mcowger]

Not sure what you mean by a 2 hypervisor server...you can only run 1 hypervisor at a time on a server....

[Catsrules]

I have two physical servers. I just got my second one and was wondering if I can do anything extra now that I have two physical boxes

[mcowger · Accepted solution]

I see.

yes, all sorts of neat stuff.  You can't combine them into 1 server, but you can do interesting things like create automatic failover clusters of VMs (if a machine fails, it restarts in the other one - called HA), migrate a live running workload from 1 host to another (to do physical maint., without downtime - this is called vMotion) or simply run 2 copies of the same VM so that even if a phsyical host falls over, nothing happens to users because the backup VM takes over with no delay (called Fault Tolerance).

Note that all of these required a paid license for the hypervisor and vCenter server (you are looking at around $10K).

[Catsrules]

That is very cool.

I thought I read some where that you could have a server(s) auto turn on if there was a high demand. They where advertising you could save power that way or something. I am guessing that is for big data centers and not applicable to my little 2 server data center in the bacement.   And that is probably for millions of small jobs. I was thinking about clustering, for video encoding. 1 Big job and need to split between the two.

Ouch 10K I guess I will need to break open my piggy bank and start counting my pennies.

[DSTAVERT]

With three or fewer servers you can use the Essentials Plus package which is much less expensive yet has those features. http://www.vmware.com/solutions/smb/index.html

http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/small-business/overview.html

[Catsrules]

I will have to look in to that.

Thanks for you help everyone