Home Lab HA For Free?

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Supreme [H]ardness
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Besides Hyper-V (which needs AD which I don't really want to wetup) is there any other hypervisor that can do it for free? I really like ESXi and am currently using it. OpenStack seems a bit too complicated for home use.
 
XenServer 6.2 is open source now...should be able to set that up for free. However, if you go through the trouble of setting up AD and use Hyper-V with Datacenter edition (that you can get for free from www.dreamspark.com with a .edu e-mail address) then you can install as many Windows servers as you want to.

Also, Hyper-V doesn't REQUIRE AD, it's just much easier if you set it up.
 
Does anyone have any good, easy to understand walkthrough on setting up a vCenter cluster? I can install ESXi, create VMs, do all the iSCSI stuff, but where do I go from there? I have two servers. Do I create a vCenter VM on the cluster or does it need to be a seperate server? IE a third server?
 
/usr/home said:
Does anyone have any good, easy to understand walkthrough on setting up a vCenter cluster? I can install ESXi, create VMs, do all the iSCSI stuff, but where do I go from there? I have two servers. Do I create a vCenter VM on the cluster or does it need to be a seperate server? IE a third server?
Click to expand...

there a OVA you can download from vmware.

http://boerlowie.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/building-the-ultimate-vsphere-lab-part-8-vcenter/

I used this when configuring mine. You can skip the SQL stuff and use the integrated SQL server or setup a separate one like the guide does. I did this due to i plan to build out a view environment and it uses SQL as well. Centralized database made more sense in my case.
 
I also suggesting installing vCenter as a VM so it can be made highly available. The only thing I like more about XenServer is that there is no central management server. If vCenter dies then you have very limited capabilities in your cluster until you get it back up and running. But in XenServer if your master dies you can promote a new master.
 
So I have the vCenter Server VM hosted on my 2 server cluster. If the server currently hosting the vServer VM fails suddenly, doesn't the vCenter Server need to be up to fail the VMs over or will it still failover?
 
VMware HA doesn't depend on vCenter. HA will restart vCenter itself, if it goes down.
 
NetJunkie said:
VMware HA doesn't depend on vCenter. HA will restart vCenter itself, if it goes down.
Click to expand...

Gotcha. Is there a way to say keep the VMs on this server, failover to the backup but then upon restore of the first server, have them move back? Sort of like HSRP? Can you set a "preference" host per VM?
 
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