General question re: virtualization/data storage.

Hey guys, I've been trying to find this information on my own, but not really coming up with the answers my brain thinks it needs.

I am currently running a WHS2011 server with an atom based(510) supermicro board that I was able to grab for relatively cheap with 5 2tb WD green drives and an older 300Gig drive I use for the OS/swap folder(where I stick stuff before it gets label/cataloged properly).

I've recently had the idea to begin playing with virtualization, and picked up a late model AMD board with server specs, etc...

I've chosen ESXi 5.0 for the time being, but would be open to options as well.

What I was thinking of doing was install WHS2011 virtually with more or less the same system set up, just with the ability to use up the horse power of this machine and play with other OS installs while my server runs. The problem I have run into is location of the storage drives. Would it be smart to purchase a LSI card and just commit that card and it's drives to the WHS image, or would I be better off with an iSCSI type setup? I know I am going to want to expand my capacity in the future as well, so this would avoid the annoyance of relying on on-board sata ports or cheap sata cards(like I have been up till now).

So to cut it short I guess, I'm just looking for ideas. I'm not against learning new things, or changing my strategy. Basically I think I bit off more than I could chew at once. Would I be better served by installing a VMware on top of a WHS2011 install?

Bump, any ideas?

Allo, anyone?

I'd first make sure your motherboard supports VT-d (or AMD equivalent as I don't know their hardware) so you have the ability to pass the card through to a VM. If so, picking up a cheap LSI 2008 HBA like the IBM 1015 (which are super stable, well supported, and can usually be found "new" on eBay from around $75) is a nice way to go. You need to remember that the pass through is at the controller level so you can't use your on-board ports for both ESXi data store and also have them passed through to a VM. So you're pretty much going to need an extra card unless the board has more then one disk controller on it.

For data storage I'm a fan of ZFS (via Solaris or one of the OpenSolaris derivatives) for a number of reasons and it works well in the all-in-one type setup allowing access via CIFS, NFS, iSCSI, AFP, etc. If you're still attached to WHS2011 you could run it along side a ZFS VM giving it storage either through virtual disks shared back to ESXi over NFS or more directly with iSCSI. Even if you go only WHS2011 I'd still go the ESXi route as opposed to trying to run VMware on top of WHS2011.

Happy building.

^ This.

Thanks very much, still new with virtualization so it's nice to have a little kick in the butt saying I'm more or less on the right path.

You could also do Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V server the WHS 2011 installation. Then you don't have to worry about vt-d.