Looking to make a bigger splash in to VMs

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Sparkyy

[H]ard|Gawd
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So I have used Microsoft Virtual PC and soon discovered VirtualBox which is great as it allows me to run a couple VMs on my system at anytime but recently I was shown ESXi and it is by far one of the best things I have come across in terms in virtualization.

This isn't for a company or mission critical, simply for me to learn more about virtualization and to have fun with it. Ideally I would like to have enough power, both processing and RAM to run say two or three Server 2003s, a couple XP or Vista machines and Untangle.

So some what of a small network but fully virtualized and running all through Untangle so it would assume my router was the ISP, again solely for playing and experimenting with at the same time.

I currently have a Pentium 4 3.2Ghz HT with just 2Gb DDR ram and a WD 640GP drive that I slapped together from my spare part collection and runs decent but doubt it could handle what I want. :(

Would running a dual or even single Xeon be overkill for this idea, how about RAM as 8Gb might be enough but this is where I am fuzzy as what I need in terms in having a good system to toy with but not enough that it dims my lights every time I hit the power switch.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated, thanks! :D
 
If I was looking to do what you want done, I would want at least a single quad-core and 8GB of RAM. That will give you a very pleasant experience.
 
Sparkyy said:
... both processing and RAM to run say two or three Server 2003s, a couple XP or Vista machines and Untangle.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated, thanks! :D
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My suggestion would be to clearly define your requirements prior to moving ahead. Do you really need a 3 Windows servers along with two Vista machines and Untangle? Most everything can be sufficiently tested with two to three computers.

If it is just for testing/learning, then your current setup may be close to sufficient (not sure whether ESXi will install on it), Server 2003 will install with 128MB of RAM, it won't be pretty, but it will work. Similarly XP will run with 128MB.

Between overhead, VMs, and oversubscribing you have enough RAM and CPU to make it work without to spend more cash at this time. Try it out and see what happens.
 
More to set it up as a real environment, do some AD, DNS, maybe make a secondary AD server, just really using Server 2003.

ESXi actually is running on my P4 3.2 with 2Gb of ram but I just don't want it to limit me in terms of not having enough horsepower to run everything.
 
I guess I am looking at it from the "the least expensive home lab" side. If you can run everything, and it gives you acceptable performance, then you don't need a new box. If the objective is to save money, then install everything you want to run on the box you have and see what happens.

If the objective is to validate your plan to purchase new hardware, well ..., then go all out! ;)
The truly limiting factor in these setups is most allways disk I/O long before you hit CPU or RAM limits.
 
Yeah I should just start loading things up and see where it goes, might do just RAID 0 to keep the I/O a little higher than single disk but RAID 10 would be nicer. :D

Anyways this board is limited to 4Gb of RAM that it can use since it is a DDR board and I should probably get 4 - 1Gb sticks instead of the 4 - 512mb sticks I have now.

Still a dual processor, quad core Xeon's sound nice. :D:D Thanks for the inputs so far!
 
Sparkyy said:
More to set it up as a real environment, do some AD, DNS, maybe make a secondary AD server, just really using Server 2003.

ESXi actually is running on my P4 3.2 with 2Gb of ram but I just don't want it to limit me in terms of not having enough horsepower to run everything.
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Go buy a cheap DL380 off of ebay (or dell 2900) and be done :)
 
lopoetve said:
Go buy a cheap DL380 off of ebay (or dell 2900) and be done :)
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this is honestly not a bad recommendation, at all. Thuleman is right, as well. Disk I/O is usually a killer for home lab setups. 2, maximum of 3VMs, per disk spindle, as a rule of thumb. If you get up to a RAID-5 config, apply the rule of thumb to only the usable disks (n-1) to determine disk I/O guidelines.
 
And honestly, a cheap 2900 or 1950 with a PERC card will do just fine for esx :)
 
So like computers have been for ages now, the processor is important to have but it's all about the hard drives and I/O transfers. What version of PERC controller or does it matter?
 
If you decide to get a used dell, make sure it's a used 1900/1950 or 2900/2950

The older generations (1850, 2850) will not support 64bit guest OS's
 
Sparkyy said:
So like computers have been for ages now, the processor is important to have but it's all about the hard drives and I/O transfers. What version of PERC controller or does it matter?
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4/5/6i, just make sure it has the battery backed cache, and get the patch for the cache write issue.
 
aren't Perc 4's the SCSI U320 variant? 5i is a SAS/SATA controller for internal drives, and 6 is for external expanders or shelves over IB.
 
IIRC, 6/5 both have internal connections available. Perc4 is the older SCSI, but still plenty fast. :)
 
Start with what you can. I have been using Hyper V and am very happy with what I can do.
Here is my virtual setup:

Windows Server 2008 R2
HP ProLiant DL360G5
(2) Intel Quad Cores
16GB RAM
(3) 72GB SAS (RAID 5)

eBay is your friend for this kind of gear.
 
My take on this is:
- Get a cheap Intel Q6600
- Get 8 Gigs of DDR2 ram
- Couple of HDDs
- a mobo for the above.

You'll have lots of capacity for what you are doing.

I am running this setup (see sig) and Server 2003 R2, Vista x64, and XP clients all running at the same time and she barely breaks a sweat.
 
The PC I have in my spec gives me about 3x Win SVR 2K8's and 1 xp, vista or win7, which I've run on a single drive before. Typically I only have 2 Servers up with one client for any testing though...

As stated before just get a quad core processor, some DDR2 or 3 RAM and with a decent mobo and you'll be set for any of your learning needs.

I run all these at one time, play music, surf the web, and game without even noticing a slow down on my PC.
 
After looking around I did find a PowerEdge 2600 with 5gb of ram with two Intel Xeon (dual-core) processors @ 2.8 Ghz and about 327gb of SCSI 10k hard drives for $100.

Now I know it cannot run 64bit OS's but I don't have any 64bit OS's and as the title says just want to make a bigger splash to get more comfortable in VMs themselves so I can always just get another system down the road.

Also I found a PowerEdge 2800 but it only has one 2.8Ghz Xeon processor; 800mhz bus speed, 1gb of ram and 4x 36gb 15k SCSI drives, again no 64 bit OS's but it is also $100.

Should I go for either of those or keep looking? :confused: Thanks.
 
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Keep looking. Also make sure you are willing to deal with the noise of a real server. Its quite a racket. Though I work with hundreds of servers a day, I don't want to hear them when I am at home so I white boxed my ESXi environment. Silence is golden.
 
Treyshadow said:
Keep looking. Also make sure you are willing to deal with the noise of a real server. Its quite a racket. Though I work with hundreds of servers a day, I don't want to hear them when I am at home so I white boxed my ESXi environment. Silence is golden.
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Nice, yeah seems the most around are rack mountable which makes sense for a business setting but I don't have a rack to mount things in so makes it limited.
Treyshadow, what are your specs for the ESXi box you are running.
Quiet is always a good thing though my 1200 has all it's fans on high so not silent but still quiet enough.
 
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You have no idea ;) The comparison between a normal system and a rack-server is... well, huge :p
 
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