Every admin knows a few tricks to find a short way when testing your VMs. Some of them are neat, and some aren’t, such as snapshots. Disk Mode in VMware ESXI allows you to replace this technology with a safe alternative!
As the name of this article is hinting, I’m going to discuss the answers to the said questions. My beginner colleagues are often wondering what virtual disk is preferable to choose. Therefore, although I was talking about this topic a while ago here and there, it’s time to get to the point.
Last year, my colleague asked me for advice. He couldn’t add an iSCSI target, provided by AWS Storage Gateway, on VMware ESXi cluster. So, initially, this material was intended to serve as a manual. However, since I got a similar question once more just recently, I realized that this topic could be interesting to the others as well, which is why I decided to share this guide, hoping it will be useful.
ESXi is often told to be a free hypervisor. I’ve mentioned in my previous post that there are actually two free ESXi versions: Evaluation and Free. The thing is, both have several limitations that make them unfit for production use. The former has a 60-day time limit, but it provides all the ESXi features. The latter, in its turn, has no time limits, but it lacks many cool hypervisor features. With all that being said, it becomes clear why you just buy from VMware at some point even though you are potentially good to go with any of those free licenses.
If you are new to VMware or just starting out in the tech, you may feel a bit confused about products naming. Well, at least I was. There are tons of products in the suite so many have a hard time grasping how all those things come together. For instance, it may be hard for a beginner to tell apart ESXi and vSphere. What should you do? Well, nothing special, you know. Google. Ask fellow admins. Look through forums. Read books. Well, my post is not here to bring you from the very beginning to finish.