Ever since ESXi was introduced and VMware released it as "free" it always carried a stigma that "we" wouldn't run the lesser ESXi in an enterprise environment-after all it's free so it must be missing something. We all know that ESXi is not free if you want to hook it into Virtual Center and use DRS/HA...in fact, it costs exactly the same as ESX and one might be able to argue its missing something. Now my challenge... I am migrating a significant number of ESX 3.5 hosts to vSphere within the next month or so. I am having an internal debate with some colleagues to determine if we should move to ESXi or continue with ESX.
I think I have heard the spectrum of existing arguments concerning the decision to move to ESXi. I have heard "the Service Console is just about end-of-life" to ESXi is missing "a ton" of functionality-as one frequent Communities poster put it. What is the real difference for an enterprise? In the past we didn't move to ESXi because we wanted to install the Dell OpenManage agents on the ESX hosts. This hasn't been a problem since 3.5 and ESXi 4 is even better now that Dell is tapping into the ESX 4 CIM provider. Our storage array agents are not required-so we don't need the service console for that either. So it really comes down to managing the ESX environment.
From what I can tell, using the vMA or RCLI for vSphere ESXi 4 all the important VMware command-line tools (esxcfg-vswitch, esxcfg-mpath, esxcfg-nics, etc.) are all present and run just fine over the VMware web service. In particular I was concerned about losing the Management network and not being able to use the vMA or RCLI to reconfigure or troubleshoot...but sure enough, I am covered by visiting the physical console and entering unsupported mode which provides all the esxcfg* commands. An again, if I am having to use a local console because I can't communicate over the Web Service to modify the ESX/ESXi configuration I wouldn't be able to use the SSH Service Console anyway. Logging, losing vmkernel and vmkwarning would be tragic..but vMA appliance using VILOGGER collects and manages each ESXi logs conveniently in one central location (like SYSLOG to a central server but better because the logs are stored by the ESXi hostname).
Scripting....Well, scripting is easily covered by the vMA appliance with the fastpass technology. Not really losing anything there. Most people, as far as I can tell, are not installing backup agent software directly on the Service Console or really pushing the envelope by using third party software in the Service Console. Remotely editing files located in /vmfs wouldn't be possible under ESXi (in a supported config)--that would be missed.
So the benefits of ESXi...32MB footprint, no 1600MB of memory dedicated to Service Console, better security due to less services and ports open, boot time under two minutes for most hardware vs ESX 10 minute boot time, rebuild time under 10 minutes. And the one nobody seems to know the real answer to....the Service Console has been reported for some time now that it will be going away with the "next" release. Well, that's what we thought about ESX4---sure enough they released a Service Console. It would be nice to have a clear indicator from VMware that they plan to dump the Service Console that way customers moving to vSphere could prepare their support folks for the changes ESXi brings (for example, no navisphere agents for the EMC storage admins).
Can somebody remind me why I should continue with ESX (with Service Console) and not move to ESXi? Thank you in advance for any comments.