caffrey Posted February 8, 2014 Posted February 8, 2014 Virtualization on the cheap, can it be done ? I'm looking at virtualization for personal development as well as consolidating all the random boxes I have serving various roles. But like any school, budgets are practically non existent. I'd like to seperate the roles that have just been growing on one server as I test and put into production. (WSUS, MDT WDS, VAMP plus other odd roles plus AV) I also have two linux servers, one serving unifi and one as a silly intranet server, worst thing about some of these random boxes is the fact there is no disaster management nor backups... vmware is out of the question due to cost I assume, so I'm most likely left with using 2012r2 datacentre and running hyper-v. Now I have no NAS / SAN but would like to try iSCSI on freenas, is this viable ? I've managed to wrestle some extra money and acquired a refurb HP G5 (thanks dave at ict-direct) which has plenty of grunt for this purpose I hope. Anyone in a similar situation with any tips ?
twin--turbo Posted February 8, 2014 Posted February 8, 2014 Yes it can be done on the cheap. We used 5 old G5 as a test environment and they worked fine. find a solution to back up your VDISK regularly to other storage. ( ghetoVCB for vmware is gr8 ) Citrix Xen is free and fully featured. vMware ESX is free but has no HA/clustering Rob 1
jmcdermott Posted February 8, 2014 Posted February 8, 2014 We are running a standard quad core AMD with 16 gig of ram on a standard desktop board, running windows server hyper-v. works lovely for our Unify, opennas, temporary backup server, web site, and a few other servers without any problems. Running mirror raid on the drives for redundancy. Would not recommend WDS on it as network speed may be a problem without some expensive network cards. 1
3s-gtech Posted February 8, 2014 Posted February 8, 2014 We did it on the super-cheap with ESXi free. We currently have a large number of VMs running on three hosts, backed up with GhettoVCB so in the event of a failure the backup can be moved across to another host. 1
seawolf Posted February 8, 2014 Posted February 8, 2014 You can do virtualization fairly inexpensively, but be careful about going too cheap or your performance and reliability will actually end up being poorer than for a traditional physical environment (as well as being far more complex). I would suggest you spend your money on two well spec'd hosts that are on the HCL of your chosen virtualization solution, and a good backup solution if you are going to virtualized on the "cheap". Use local storage on your hosts rather than a NAS/SAN, unless you have the dough to build something like a SAM-SD (http://sam-sd.john-refactored.com/doku.php), and have a decent understanding of SANs. FreeNAS is perfectly suitable (we use it here) and I would definitely recommend it for your backup storage combined with Veeam and/or BackupAssist depending on if you use ESXi or Hyper-V. SuperMicro hardware (DIY) is a good way to keep your costs down for backup storage, but just be sure to use enterprise (RAID quality) drives such as the WD SE or RE lines with any RAID storage or you may have issues. 1
caffrey Posted February 9, 2014 Author Posted February 9, 2014 (edited) Cheers everyone, Been reading about and thanks to your advice, I intend to try the following :- EXSi free version and backing up with the free version of veeam, I'd really like good DR and failover in place but that just won't happen because that comes at a cost (as do all things that make our lives easier ). I'll boot EXSi using a usb stick using the headers inside the server (or create a mirror) and I'll configure the rest of the physical storage as raid 10 for the VM pool giving me 144 ish gig (72gig sas drives) the drives are refurb so this is just reassurance, this should be enough space for the VMs. Later when I need more storage / VMs I'll explore freenas with ZFS and iSCSI Should give me something to start with anyway. Edited February 9, 2014 by caffrey
diagdave Posted February 9, 2014 Posted February 9, 2014 Why not use hyperv 2012. Use hyper replica for DR or a cluster for failover. plus vms can even be stores on an smb share.
blundellm Posted February 9, 2014 Posted February 9, 2014 consider Proxmox. Its a VM environment built on a Linux core. It runs every VM appliance I've chosen to throw at it, has a simple web-based interface, and costs nothing. Download and use for free.
caffrey Posted February 10, 2014 Author Posted February 10, 2014 Cheers, Seems the hyper-v server (the baremetal one) can only be administered with RSAT for windows 8.1 too, wonder if this'll give me an opportunity to get a new PC ... ;p so it'll have to be full install of server 2012r2 with hyper-v
tmcd35 Posted February 10, 2014 Posted February 10, 2014 For me, the questsion of ESXi vs. Hyper-V depends largely on if you currently run Windows Server and what you future upgrade plans are. Licensing wise, You'll pretty much want a copy of Windows Server DataCenter in order to run multiple VM's, at which point you have Hyper-V included free in the pacakge. Add to that Hyper-V in 2012 supports replication (and I think failover) without the need for shared storage... From what I remember ESX is the better product, but costs to get all the equivalent features. If you're looking at central management with something like SCVMM for Hyper-V then ESX will become a contender again as the vSphere Management Center cost about the same price (I think) and gives ESX many of the missing features from the free version.
caffrey Posted February 10, 2014 Author Posted February 10, 2014 It's going to be a case of weighing up the pros and cons, end of the day it's just going to serve relatively non critical services
PotNoodleTech Posted February 10, 2014 Posted February 10, 2014 Veeam does not work on ESXi free sadly. Version 6.1 does
Chuckster Posted February 10, 2014 Posted February 10, 2014 Are you guys running Hyper-V 2008R2/2012 Core or do you run Hyper-V server role on top of the full blown OS?
caffrey Posted February 21, 2014 Author Posted February 21, 2014 So I've got ESXi setup on a usb stick, everything is working - datastore on a raid6 .I've got my first few VM's attached to the domain with some test services running - what's the catch ? This was incredibly easy to set up - must be something I've missed ? If not why didn't I do this sooner ? 1
seawolf Posted February 21, 2014 Posted February 21, 2014 So I've got ESXi setup on a usb stick, everything is working - datastore on a raid6 .I've got my first few VM's attached to the domain with some test services running - what's the catch ? This was incredibly easy to set up - must be something I've missed ? If not why didn't I do this sooner ? The only catch is, make sure everything is backed up well, especially if you only have one host. All the eggs in one basket as they say.
PotNoodleTech Posted February 21, 2014 Posted February 21, 2014 So I've got ESXi setup on a usb stick, everything is working - datastore on a raid6 .I've got my first few VM's attached to the domain with some test services running - what's the catch ? This was incredibly easy to set up - must be something I've missed ? If not why didn't I do this sooner ? There is no catch! Welcome to VMWare. Now all you need is version 6.1 of Veeam Free edition and you can do ad hoc full backups of your Virtual machines too. If you think Vmware is good - Veeam is the icing on the cake!!
caffrey Posted February 21, 2014 Author Posted February 21, 2014 Seems like veeam free does only support essentials it's a shame VMware don't do academic pricing like they do in the USA so I may have to end up asking for some money for a essentials licence.
PotNoodleTech Posted February 21, 2014 Posted February 21, 2014 (edited) There is no catch! Welcome to VMWare. Now all you need is version 6.1 of Veeam Free edition and you can do ad hoc full backups of your Virtual machines too. If you think Vmware is good - Veeam is the icing on the cake!! Note the bold. If you can find that version, it works on ESXi free... not sure if Veeam realise it or not .... (you ain't seen me - roiigght?) Edited February 21, 2014 by PotNoodleTech
cpjitservices Posted February 21, 2014 Posted February 21, 2014 This can be done.... We bought 4x IBM X3455 servers off of ebay for about £100 each for a lab environment, 12 gig RAM - 664Bit Quad cores etc... 2x Running VMWare 5.5. free and 2x running KVM. Data backs off to a network share.
detjo Posted February 21, 2014 Posted February 21, 2014 By looks of it, Veeam free edition doesn't restore individual guest files. Am i reading that right? So if someone loses a Word doc I cant restore it? I had plans on having the servers running as VMs, with user Docs and shares outside the VMs (so they are simply using space on the host drives). This was because Hyper-V doesnt give back space inside VHDs from deleted files, without compressing - which you cant do whilst the guest server is running. Or has this all changed in 2012 R2 ?
xenonive Posted February 21, 2014 Posted February 21, 2014 I use Veeam for whole server backups and Previous Versions in Windows Server VM, I've set 20-30% of my drive space for previous version which give me file or directory level restores for previous 6-8 months with 2 snapshots a day 7am and 1am.
FragglePete Posted February 21, 2014 Posted February 21, 2014 We've been running XenServer for several years now; three physical hosts running 12 VM's on local storage. No cost at all apart from the Windows Licensing. Has been rock solid; had an uptime of nearly 900 days on each server up until a couple of weeks ago when we had a power failure and we had to shut everything down. Newer versions have all the premium features free now and you can choose to pay just for support. We're now replacing it with Hyper-V. Don't get me wrong, XenServer been great but I just like to see what it's doing within a Windows environment and Hyper-V 2012R2 seems fantastic and with 2012R2 Datacentre you can throw as many VM's at it with the license model, plus I want to get exposure to the Microsoft Virtualisation technologies. We just got a new Dell Server and SAN in as our first step with adding another server next finance year (September) to start take advantage of High Availability, etc. Exciting times. Pete
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