I have a HP blade in a C7000 enclosure and a new 3PAR StoreServ 7200 over Fibre Channel. Today we use DAS and have not virtualized our SQL servers.
My goal is: SQL Server 2008 -> WS2012R2 -> ESXi 5.5 -> Blade G8 -> C7000 Enclosure -> FC Switch -> 3PAR StoreServ 7200.
The hardware part is supported by HP/3PAR. I will use ESXi 5.5 standalone, managed by vSphere 5.5 directly. I will do this since I only want a single VM on that host. We use vCenter for the rest of the VM's on different Blade hosts, but our SQL server is 1 VM on 1 host, therefore the free direct management.
I just have one question: Since I do not purchase a vCenter license and therefore run the ESXi as "free", will I have the same options regarding storage, as a vCenter enrolled ESXi host? I want to see the FC/3PAR storage from within vSphere on my ESXi host, so I can add this as storage.
Please advise, since I must prepare all servers, vmware, windows, SAN switches etc. and have it all up and running before the 3PAR techie comes and install 3PAR. He asks for 4 FC wires to plug his 3PAR into, the rest is on me.
Thank you very much.
