mikkydoos Posted June 10, 2013 Posted June 10, 2013 Hi, What VM platform should I use ? Just got in a server to virtualise Windoze 2008 R2 /2012 Servers to replace old hardware... HP DL360p Gen8 - 4TB HDD - RAIDed, 2 x CPU, 72GB RAM, 4 x 1GB NIC, dual power etc etc. Platform will be Debian most likely. I'm aiming to virtualise up to 5 Windoze servers and one Smoothwall... So far It'll be... 1 x Domain controller, DNS, Auth, GPO etc 1 x WDS, WSUS, IIS, Apps 1 x Smoothwall / Proxy 1 x MS Exchange ... and anything I might need in the future. Got 30TB of NAS's and file server for storage so no file serving or anything like that. I've used the free version of Virtualbox quite a bit on my PC but reckon VMWare will be a better solution for this purpose. If so, what version do I need and is there a freebie version that will do what I want. ~Cheers for your comments~ ; )
FN-GM Posted June 10, 2013 Posted June 10, 2013 FYI Vmware free version is limited to 32GB RAM per host.
dhicks Posted June 10, 2013 Posted June 10, 2013 Platform will be Debian most likely. Many virtulisation systems run as their own OS, so you don't so much install the VM system on top of a particular OS, you simply install the VM system as the base OS. If you do specifically want to use Debian, then I use Xen on Debian myself. That's not the same as XenServer (the commercial implementation of Xen, which installs as its own self-contained OS) or Xen Cloud Server (which seems to be the open source version of XenServer). There's various reasons I like my Xen-on-Debian system, but you'd probably find a all-in-one system like Xen Cloud Server or Proxmox better suited to your needs. You could also look at "cloud" platforms, which take packaged virtualisation systems a step further and add storage and volume management and so on. I'm currently trying out OpenStack on Fedora, which I'm finding a bit of a blighter to get installed, but you could also try Eucalyptus.
ZeroHour Posted June 10, 2013 Posted June 10, 2013 Proxmox helps run EduGeek btw v3 just came out at well. Performance is okay when using openvz nodes but Windows is a little sluggish (v2).
mikkydoos Posted June 13, 2013 Author Posted June 13, 2013 Thanx for your comments guys. VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) free. Any experiences or recommendations / disadvantages ?? Cheers in advance ; )
teejay Posted June 13, 2013 Posted June 13, 2013 Thanx for your comments guys. VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) free. Any experiences or recommendations / disadvantages ?? Cheers in advance ; ) Disadvantage is it won't run on your server as you have too much RAM, max it supports is 32gb. It will work for a while in eval mode and then stop unless you buy a license for it. Your cheapest option would be to buy VMWare essentials. Personally I would've bought 2 lower spec servers so you have some redundancy. You could also look at using Server 2012 Hyper-V which is actually pretty good now, much better than the 2008 versions. If your DC is on 2008R2 or lower, I would strongly recommend upgrading that to 2012 as that has much better support for virtualised DCs.
mikkydoos Posted June 13, 2013 Author Posted June 13, 2013 (edited) Cheers Teejay, I will have redundancy on a lower spec server. Doesn't the RAM limitation of VMWare just limit the amount of virtual RAM you can allocate for each VM ? I thought I better load it with RAM because Windoze is so bloaty still. Edited June 13, 2013 by mikkydoos
teejay Posted June 13, 2013 Posted June 13, 2013 Nope, it's the total RAM in the server, if you're going to use a second server for resilience then you will want vcenter, which is in the essentials or essentials plus packs. The plus pack gives much better resilience as it has High Availability and vmotion included, another part which would be useful for you is that it include storage appliance which allows you to use local storage as shared storage. VMware really is a piece of cake to set up, much easier than Hyper V 2012, but I would use Hyper V 2012 in your situation unless you can afford VMware essentials plus. The only thing I would say about virtualisation solutions outside VMware and Hyper V is that these two are by far the market leaders in the small medium business area, so you will find it much easier and cheaper to get help and support on these two than other virtualisation solutions and if you left the school, then it will be much easier to replace you with someone who has experience of these. 1
mikkydoos Posted June 13, 2013 Author Posted June 13, 2013 Cheers Teejay. Have to buy it then. Thanks for your help m8 ; )
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