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First go at Virtualization

G

Greatone123

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
May 10, 2006
Messages
1,293
I've always tried to learn as much about anything as I possibly can. How computers work and to build them, networking them together and whatnot. I just recently subscribed to Technet and well I wanted to setup a lot of new things to learn how it all works together.

I've got a few systems and I'd like to run a lot of things, I'm not sure if I can run this stuff on 1 single system or if I have to spread them out over several servers. Since I don't have one of those big like Dual Quad Xeons with crazy amounts of ram I figured I'd use Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 since it's free, and well I already downloaded it and have it loaded onto a system.

List of things Needed"

  1. Domain Controller
  2. Active Directory
  3. Exchange Server
  4. Forefront Security Server
  5. Website
  6. Game Server (Call of Duty 4 and soon 6/MW2)
  7. Microsoft System Center stuff

Remember most of this stuff is purely for me wanting to learn and explore Microsoft's offerings... since I get access to them I want to test drive them.

Problem #1: I've never setup any of this stuff before so I don't know what kind of system load I'll have in the first place or to even actually set the stuff up.

Here is what I have to work with: (all x64 compatible)

1x Quad-Core w/ 8GB of ram (I have Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 currently installed on this system)

3x Dual-Core w/ 4GB of ram (nothing on those)


The only thing I'll ask here since this is the Virtual part of the forums (trying to stay on topic and not trail off) how should I divide up the roles and machines/VMs ?

if I need to put hyper-V on multiple systems to make it all work better I still can.


Local 4 computers at most. Remote user for exchange (gonna setup account to test and play with remote e-mail for future plans if it works) the game server will obviously have the most internet usage, prolly 20 people at most anymore and I'll have to get better net access anyway :-P

if you need any more info feel free to ask, I don't know what other info you need...

if there are any more requirements I don't know of please let me know so I don't go crazy wondering why something is working...
 
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Let's just start by saying that you are in violation of the TechNet license agreement if you are using those licenses for anything but your own (read, no other users) purposes and you can certainly not run a public web site or the game server on TechNet licenses.

Other than that, as always, disk I/O will determine how many VMs you can put on a single machine. In addition Hyper-V doesn't allow you to oversubscribe memory, so you really can't pile too much stuff on the same physical machine. Your RAM is probably going to be somewhat of an issue since the host will gobble up a bunch of it.

In the end there's no sense to speculate, just start installing VMs on your 8GB box till you run out of RAM and see what happens. If it's too slow then you can always start powering up the 4GB ones and transfer a VM at a time over to those.
 
Website and Game Server will be on the same system/VM, which is XP which I have a license for since the website is for the game server and has to have access to the same DB which will be with MySQL which will be on the same system/VM. I got that before I got the subscription :)


How much RAM does the Hyper-V Server 2008 use? I mean geez it doesn't even have a real GUI.
 
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Greatone123 said:
Website and Game Server will be on the same system/VM, which is XP which I have a license for since the website is for the game server and has to have access to the same DB which will be with MySQL which will be on the same system/VM. I got that before I got the subscription :)


How much RAM does the Hyper-V Server 2008 use? I mean geez it doesn't even have a real GUI.
Click to expand...

still, his point is that you are running a production VM on a host that is licensed through means that does not support that activity.
 
seriously guys? seriously?

Hyper-V Server 2008 is a FREE <-- see that!? FREE and is freely distributed by microsoft to ANYONE that wants it! there IS NO LICENSE! Why? because there is NO HOST, not even a GUI it's all command line! yay!

Don't believe me?
http://www.microsoft.com/hyper-v-server/en/us/default.aspx

look on the right "FREE DOWNLOAD"


Stop telling me about licensing and what I can and cannot do, I already know all that stuff, and I already know what I'm trying to do it acceptable.



I'm sorry if I'm sounding negative here... but seriously all I've gotten is "you can't do that" posts and it's BS...
 
It's correct that you don't need to worry about licensing Hyper-V. It's just that you listed all that other stuff, Exchange, Forefront, System Center, etc. Either way, even if you do use a TechNet license, odds are small that you will get busted, it's just not in the spirit of things.

Hyper-V Server requires 1GB of RAM, with 2GB recommended. That's pretty steep for your 4GB machines. If you provision Hyper-V and the guests at the required levels, you may run into disk swapping, which would be a real performance killer since the disk is already your bottleneck.

Honestly, in your situation I would probably not spin up different VMs for each purpose but instead just run Exchange, Forefront, SC, etc. all on the same VM.

Maybe you can pull 4GB from one of the 4GB boxes and put it into another to make an 8GB box out of it? If not, and depending on open DIMMs, you may want to just buy 4GB for the 4GB machines, that shouldn't be that expensive.

In the end it's all just theory though till you actually spin those VMs up and see what performance will be like in your environment.
 
Thinking about that... it almost makes me wonder if i should even go with VMs at all... just load all the private stuff on the 8gb system... and use a 4gb for the game/web stuff.

i could prolly skip out on the SC... but my biggest concern/reason for going virtual was i wasn't sure if i should put everything on 1 system.
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`danny said:
You could always give ESXi a try :)
Click to expand...

I would second this idea, I have an ESXi 4 server booting from a USB memory stick with 10 disks, 8 running off of a perc 5i and 2 running off of the intel controller for iso / backup storage only.

Things to remember with ESX is that while you can format a single SATA disk with VMFS if you have the right chipset, you cannot raid them. RAID has to be done in hardware. Also the requirements for the network interface can be a deal breaker.

That said, my server has 8GB of ram, a core 2 duo 6420 and I run between 8 and 12 VM's with little issue. ESX has a Balloon driver for the ram that allow over commitment of memory resources, thus allowing more VM's to equal amounts of memory compared to Hyper-V.

In all honesty you would be better off running either a light linux distro or win 2k3 and installing the free VMware Server since it allow some swapping of virtual memory.
 
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