I have taken the company I work for and brought them down the VMware path. They are an Oracle programming house in business for over 30 years. They have several Government contracts and have recently gotten into the private sector. When I came on board they had 26 physical servers. They tasked me with providing redundancy for any disaster. Being Oracle based, they wanted to use Oracles virtual Server but I convinced management to go with VMware. I now have converted and moved 90% of the servers to a Host running ESXI Essentials, trying to upgrade to plus versions.
I want to know:
1. If I am to purchase the plus versions, is that a key install then features are available, or is it a reinstall?
2. I need a redundant active passive san. I have a Super micro running Open-E now. Works great and both read and write at 1 MS or less. Need a second but not as robust. Any thoughts?
3. And lastly, I am having an occasional bad block reported by Oracle. Now this is interesting because the block is good and the data is good but simplly not what Oracle was expecting to read. So it's a bad block occurring to them. But the error clearly shows this error is not a block thats bad, just simply not whats expected to be there. Anything would be appreciated to help me go down a right path. I am trying thick provisioning instead of thin. I am checking backups to see if they are interrupting the database during backup. Anyone have any ideas about this bad blog reported by Oracle?