Thinking of going Virtual with our server

[talksr]

Hi there,

Quite a few people both on here and in similar positions to me have suggested I should virtualise our servers.

We have a copy of VMWare ESXI which I believe is free for schools.

 

Can anyone recommend if this is worth using? My thoughts are that usually if something is free, there is a catch.

I have a copy of Server 2012 R2 running on it and it seems to be working quite well considering it is on an older HP ML350G6 server.

 

I would be looking to move over our curriculum server 2016 with active directory, DHCP etc.

 

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[jamesreedersmith]

Why not use windows Hyper-V instead - much more user friendly and better integration with windows VM;s

[talksr]

Why not use windows Hyper-V instead - much more user friendly and better integration with windows VM;s

 

Did look into this and some people suggested getting Server 2016 Data Centre, but it is quite expensive to purchase. And after spending months (I think this is now the third month) trying to install it to our server, it just doesn't work. I have had two HP engineers out this week and they are baffled. We can install server no trouble. As soon as you install the Hyper V component and bounce the server, it gets stuck booting and never boots up. We have wiped and it tried again so many times, tried different versions of server, checked the BIOS is suitably configured (Virtualisation enabled etc) and all to no avail. Has put me off a little as VMWare just went on so easily with no issues. We have version 6, and I believe we can upgrade to 6.5 which may be tricky.

[FragglePete]

Data Centre is not too expensive if your on an EES agreement. It will allow as many VMs on there as your hardware can handle.

 

The standard edition of 2016 license does allow up to two VMs to run.

 

Odd that your having issues getting it installed. I've managed to get it running on a number of old and new servers without too much difficulty. What server make and model ?

 

Pete

[3s-gtech]

ESXi upgrades are usually very easy (depending on how you run it, I only ever used it from an internal memory stick). Pop in the newer version, run the upgrade, done. Some feature changes in newer versions can make this a bit trickier, and the backup process isn't that easy for free versions (that's the catch IME).

[bossman]

@talksr

 

Have you tried Xenserver, I still have 2 of my Linux servers running as VM's on this Open Source Hypervisor and to be perfectly honest its absolutely solid and has been for the past 6 years, its free and you can purchase support if so required.

 

I have had to move our estate to Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor due to JRE as we could not get the support we required from our LA, to be honest I find Hyper-V at best tolerable and finicky and to be quite blunt I'm not 100% trusting of it at the moment whereas with Xenserver I know it is absolutely solid as a Hypervisor.

 

Not had anything to do VMWare and I know it can be quite costly if you want more than the free version can offer.

 

Just my twopennies worth, have a look at Xenserver, install it and have a go, you maybe pleasantly surprised

 

XenServer | Open Source Server Virtualization

Edited January 18, 2017 by bossman

[localzuk]

Just to clarify some licensing stuff that has been mentioned in here that looks confusing to me.

 

1. Hyper-V itself is built into Windows server.

2. If you have a Windows Server Standard license, you are allowed to run 2 Windows server VMs on top of it, each running Standard, without buying further licenses. If you want to run more VMs, you need to buy further licenses - 1 per 2 VMs.

3. If you have Windows Server Datacentre license, you can run unlimited Windows server VMs on top of it, running Standard or Datacentre, without buying any further licenses.

4. You can run as many non-Windows VMs on top of it Windows server, regardless of edition, without extra licenses - the license is just about copies of Windows Server running.

5. If you ever want to move VMs around, you are severely limited in doing so by Standard edition, but not by Datacentre.

6. If you run ESXi, the restrictions of 2 Windows Server Standard VMs per Windows server standard license still applies - so if you want to run 4 windows VMs, you'd need 2 standard edition licenses.

7. All of the Windows Server 2016 licenses are done by core now.

 

Hope this clears some stuff up.

[john]

Having used XenServer, Hyper V and VMware, depending on your needs Hyper V could work, however I found Citrix XenServer more polished at times and less finkity. Where I work now we are a VMware hosue and use it in large quantities and its very shiny and does amazing things but comes with eye watering cost. We use Hyper-V for some small scale stuff, its ok but certainly features isn't as good as the ones in XenServer or VMware but it can certainly be suitable for purpose.

[jmak]

Licensing won't be significantly different whether you use hyper-v or V as the host. Data center gives you unlimited guests on one host - if you have fewer than 6 virtual machines or body, it's cheaper to buy standard licences - each licence allows 2 virtual machines and you can have multiple standard licences on a single host.

 

Weird that you can't get hyper-It working - I've had it running on all kinds of random kit, not just servers.

[Sephiroth]

VMWare ESXi Free is very good and feature rich for a free product. It's also upgradable in future if you do find money for it. We have 1 Essentials Plus and 1 essentials licence. Essentials is actually not bad pricing. 1 thing to note though is that the free version of ESXi doesn't have any of the backup APIs in, so getting VMs backed up is a complete pain (something I found out after I set mine up at home!).

 

As has already been mentioned, you will still be required to licence your windows VMs with an appropriate licence.

[FragglePete]

Over the years, we built up our initial Virtualisation platform based on XenServer - it's been pretty rock solid and the best bit was that it's free. I have been moving us over to Hyper-V though as the backup solutions that we had did not support Xenserver and just feel I can do a lot more with these VMs running in Windows. Only one server left on XenServer, which is our SIMS server which I'm getting migrated to a new Hyper-V VM over Feb half term.

 

Pete

[talksr]

@talksr

 

Have you tried Xenserver, I still have 2 of my Linux servers running as VM's on this Open Source Hypervisor and to be perfectly honest its absolutely solid and has been for the past 6 years, its free and you can purchase support if so required.

 

I have had to move our estate to Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor due to JRE as we could not get the support we required from our LA, to be honest I find Hyper-V at best tolerable and finicky and to be quite blunt I'm not 100% trusting of it at the moment whereas with Xenserver I know it is absolutely solid as a Hypervisor.

 

Not had anything to do VMWare and I know it can be quite costly if you want more than the free version can offer.

 

Just my twopennies worth, have a look at Xenserver, install it and have a go, you maybe pleasantly surprised

 

XenServer | Open Source Server Virtualization

 

Thanks, will look into this.

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

VMWare ESXi Free is very good and feature rich for a free product. It's also upgradable in future if you do find money for it. We have 1 Essentials Plus and 1 essentials licence. Essentials is actually not bad pricing. 1 thing to note though is that the free version of ESXi doesn't have any of the backup APIs in, so getting VMs backed up is a complete pain (something I found out after I set mine up at home!).

 

As has already been mentioned, you will still be required to licence your windows VMs with an appropriate licence.

 

 

That's interesting. Do you have any idea what you paid for the licences, also was it easy enough to transfer/upgrade from the free version to the paid for version? Backing up is important, I had not even thought about that. Would rather something which is easy and painless to backup to.

[Seriun]

I have ESXI installed on our server with 2 x Windows Server 2012 VM's running, one as a DC and one as an App server hosting SIMS, WSUS, Sophos etc. ESXI is quick and easy to install. I'd definitely recommend using it.

[Chuckster]

ESXi all the way. Primary reason is, you can install it on to a USB pen, thus freeing up storage for the rest of your VMs and not wasting a RAID 1 collection purely for the OS. Plus, I don't trust MS with virtualisation as I do with VMware.

 

Oh, and if you ever want to try installing Hyper-V on a USB... just don't. It doesn't work and never will, even if the USB pen is certified by MS.

[Sephiroth]

That's interesting. Do you have any idea what you paid for the licences, also was it easy enough to transfer/upgrade from the free version to the paid for version? Backing up is important, I had not even thought about that. Would rather something which is easy and painless to backup to.

 

Offhand I don't know what we paid (it was about 3 years ago), but I can see pricing on VMWare's site for ~£500

 

Transfer/upgrade is as easy as getting a key from VMWare and putting it into your host. It'll then give you all the new features.

[Roberto]

Xen, HyperV and VMware ESXi are all good platform choices. I've got the most experience with the latter two, and of them I think that VMware ESXi is the better product if you're buying it as part of a Vsphere package (which are most certainly not cheap) which is what you'll need to do in order to enable all the features available in ESXi. Vsphere/ESXi is fairly easy to set up and get going because it basically is dedicated to creating and managing virtual workloads.

 

HyperV makes all of its features available for free wherever you use HyperV server (which is a free product in its own right, I'm not just talking about enabling the HyperV role in Windows server). However, it's harder to use, especially if you're not fully comfortable with Powershell and configuring windows via a command line. HyperV is easily set up on just one server but _does_ become more complex when you do other things with it because the more complex stuff is built on top of other windows server features (e.g. virtual clusters use windows clustering, patching uses WSUS, etc).

 

Anyway, whichever product you choose, as long as you're aware of its limits and you're sure they fit in with your needs you'll be making a great choice. They're all good virtual host platforms.

 

What you should consider is what kind of reliability you expect and require; no matter how good the hardware it can break down. No matter how good the virtual host platform, they _all_ have their bugs and issues and need patching to work at their best. If you want to virtualise several servers that represent a critical workload onto one physical box then you're putting all your eggs in one basket and, well sometimes bad stuff happens no matter how careful we are right?

 

To that end, if the workload is critical then you need to be considering creating two or more virtual host servers to mirror/share the virtual server workload so that if one breaks down the virtual systems running on top of it can "fail over" to the other server and keep going. This is well worth doing and we've done it with ESXi/Vsphere and then HyperV here for a number of years and we're really happy with it, but the costs do start to rise, if only in terms of complexity and time spent supporting it.

 

I'm not saying this to put you off - I think most workloads can and should be virtualised these days and I can't imagine doing without it now, but it does need to be planned and implemented carefully if you want to get the best out of it.

Edited January 19, 2017 by Roberto

[Blue_Cookeh]

We're a full Hyper-V school here running across 4 virtual hosts now with a mixture of Windows and Linux guests and I'd recommend it just for the ease of management, flexibility, and backups even if you only have one host.

 

That said, I'm not sure what planet some people are on, Hyper-V has been around for years and making huge leaps of progress with every release, with the ridiculous prices VMware want for their more advanced features and the resources the vSphere console use Hyper-V is a no-brainer IMO, particularly in Server 2016 on a predominantly Windows network.

Edited January 19, 2017 by Blue_Cookeh

[Roberto]

That said, I'm not sure what planet some people are on, Hyper-V has been around for years and making huge leaps of progress with every release, with the ridiculous prices VMware want for their more advanced features and the resources the vSphere console use Hyper-V is a no-brainer IMO, particularly in Server 2016 on a predominantly Windows network.

 

It cost us less money to purchase SCVMM to manage our virtual infrastructure on HyperV and pay for Windows Datacentre licences for the hosts than it would have cost to renew the support for our VSphere installation for one more year... and we'd have still needed to buy the Datacenter licences.

 

I've certainly found HyperV to be reliable, from the Windows 2012 server version onwards I'd say it's been just fine.

Edited January 19, 2017 by Roberto

[Davit2005]

I think Hyper-V core is completely free, if your'e using OpenSource OS be a cpmpletely free hypervisor.

 

Both Hyper-V and ESXi both have their but I must say that cost of ESXi specially when running Enterprise Plus ( if you have the requirement ) is the biggest drawback.

 

I find management easier of VMWare and you can still use the client with version 6.5 but you cannot seem to connect the vSphere windows client direct to vCenter like you could up until now.

 

Both ZenServer and VMware would be my choice although check your hardware is all on the VMWare Compatibilty list, I just find Hyper-V to heavy weight and cumbersome. There is no need to be able to connect the ESXi hosts themselves to the Internet and you won't get some idiot browsing web pages or using the server to do anything else than be a host for VM's much the same as ZenServer.

Edited January 19, 2017 by Davit2005

[talksr]

Offhand I don't know what we paid (it was about 3 years ago), but I can see pricing on VMWare's site for ~£500

 

Transfer/upgrade is as easy as getting a key from VMWare and putting it into your host. It'll then give you all the new features.

 

Thanks everyone for taking the time to contribute. It is really useful to know what solutions you are using.

@Sephiroth I am responding to you directly, as you have what I already have installed. We have ESXi 6.0 installed on our older HP ML350 G6 server. It is currently running a version of Server 2012 for our Sophos Enterprise Console - so if this hardware were to fail, no important data would be lost, just our antivirus solution.

 

Someone suggested on here that to maximise storage capacity on ESXi for your respective server, you could install ESXi onto a USB key. Have you done this? I believe our server has actually got an internal USB slot so I could put in a USB pen key permanently.

 

 

Not saying I wouldn't use Hyper-V for near future use, but whilst I have a successful implementation of ESXi for our antivirus, I am keen to keep using it.

[3s-gtech]

Our ESXi hosts all ran from USB (we used to have three, now just one as they've aged and been retired). Get a quality stick and make sure you have a different brand spare, as some just don't seem to work. It's a great solution - there's very little read/write from/to the stick once the machine has booted so they tend to last well. Plus, if the stick fails entirely, re-adding the VMs to a re-built host takes very little time as you can import them from the main storage.

[Blue_Cookeh]

I just find Hyper-V to heavy weight and cumbersome.

 

Someone suggested on here that to maximise storage capacity on ESXi for your respective server, you could install ESXi onto a USB key. Have you done this? I believe our server has actually got an internal USB slot so I could put in a USB pen key permanently.

 

This isn't at you guys personally, I'm just correcting some info.

 

Microsoft recommend you DO NOT use Windows Server with a GUI for Hyper-V, they would much rather you use Windows Server 2016 Core, which only has a recommended value of 512MB RAM. Also Microsoft fully support installing and running Server Core from a USB stick (this article is for 2008 R2 but same applies to 2012R2 and 2016).

[talksr]

This isn't at you guys personally, I'm just correcting some info.

 

Microsoft recommend you DO NOT use Windows Server with a GUI for Hyper-V, they would much rather you use Windows Server 2016 Core, which only has a recommended value of 512MB RAM. Also Microsoft fully support installing and running Server Core from a USB stick (this article is for 2008 R2 but same applies to 2012R2 and 2016).

 

Thanks, that is very helpful clarification. I am wondering if you can help. I have tried to install Server 16 core onto our HP ProLiant DL320e Gen8 v2.

 

If I run through the set up, it refuses to let me install to the inserted USB drive.

 

I found the following guide which has been helpful - its for an SD card, but same thing as using the USB key I have.

 

I manage to get all the way through to:

dism /Apply-Image /ImageFile:D:sourcesinstall.wim /index:3 /ApplyDir:C:

 

But it just keeps coming back at me saying:

Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool

Version: 10.0.14393.0

Error: 87

The parameter is incorrect.

Ths DISM log file can be found at X:\Windows\logs\DISM\dism.log

 

I have verified I am specifying the correct medium drive letter ( /ImageFile:D:sourcesinstall.wim ) by running the following line:

wmic logicaldisk get name

Removing the install medium, re-running the line, and re-adding it again. So I know the medium is there and the drive letter specification is correct.

 

If I view the DSIM log as mentioned in the error which is returned, this is what I find:

 

Win Server 2016 USB Install DSIM Log - Pastebin.com

 

Any ideas on what is going wrong?

Edited January 20, 2017 by talksr

[Sephiroth]

Thanks everyone for taking the time to contribute. It is really useful to know what solutions you are using.

@Sephiroth I am responding to you directly, as you have what I already have installed. We have ESXi 6.0 installed on our older HP ML350 G6 server. It is currently running a version of Server 2012 for our Sophos Enterprise Console - so if this hardware were to fail, no important data would be lost, just our antivirus solution.

 

Someone suggested on here that to maximise storage capacity on ESXi for your respective server, you could install ESXi onto a USB key. Have you done this? I believe our server has actually got an internal USB slot so I could put in a USB pen key permanently.

 

 

Not saying I wouldn't use Hyper-V for near future use, but whilst I have a successful implementation of ESXi for our antivirus, I am keen to keep using it.

 

Our main servers are running from dedicated drives in RAID1, however, I do have a development server running very happily from an 8GB flash drive.

 

As others have said, the cost of the higher tiers of VMWare are prohibitively expensive, but I can't see the need for anything smaller than a large MAT to get more than Essentials plus. The real issue comes when you need more than 3 hosts, but I would still argue that the cost is worth it for the ease of management in that environment over Hyper-V (admittedly I've not used either in an environment though).

[SHimmer45]

have you tried index:1 instead of 3

when i apply images i use 1 and it has worked for every DISM image i have ever made and applied