How to correctly setup a small network of workstations to access VM's on ESXi servers?

Question

For a small project I am working on to better my virtualisation skills, I am planning to set up an IaaS for a "small business" and have defined the following specifications:

• A small IaaS service for a small/medium business with 5-10 cloud users, running VMs hosted, built and managed by us (the provider).

• SAN storage will be utilized for hosting of VMs - OpenFiler will act as a SAN storage system.

• VSphere hypervisor will manage the VMs in use.

• Vmotion will be utilized to allow movement of VMs whilst service is uninterrupted.

• ESXi will operate on dedicated machines to act as the virtualisation server for VMs.

• VMWare High Availability component is proposed in order to provide the capability of HA cluster in order to minimize downtime, and maximize service availability.

Demonstratable components:

• 1 x node running 3 x ESXi servers to host each client workstation.

• 3 x client workstation nodes.

• 1 x node running OpenFiler to provide SAN storage, 600GB attached physical storage (100GB for each VM, and an additional 300GB for scalability purposes).

• 1 x Management node running VSphere package - VSphere client/VCenter and VMotion.

My question is:

On the client workstations which are going to be using the VM's installed on the ESXi hosts, what program should actually run on the client computers in order to run/access the VM's installed on the ESXi servers? Should it be VCenter or VSphere? Or something else alltogether?

Answer 1

Preferably you would use anything but the vSphere client to connect to the VMs, for Windows VMs use RDP. The remote console protocol in the vSphere Client is useful for simple management functions, but not suitable to do your daily work in. The display protocol of the vSphere Console is not optimized for remote work.