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Need help deciding on a virtualization product

C

ChrisCanada

n00b
Joined
Sep 23, 2009
Messages
26
So I have purchased a new server that's going to be used for a home virtualization server. I have became fed up having separate devices for everything and the power bill that goes along with it. The server will run pfsense as a router, and a Windows2008R2 instance for a BES server, OpenBSD for a proxy server and maybe a few other instances. For me to pull this off, it must support fairly complex virtual networks. I have been looking at xen, xenserver, KVM and ESXi and I'm not totally sure of what's the best. The hardware does support ESXi as I have tested it so far.

What would the recommendations be here for someone who's fairly comfortable in Linux / BSD and needs to have a host solution that supports virtual networks? From what I could see, the free version of ESXi couldn't do much of anything with virtual networks.
 
ChrisCanada said:
... <snip> From what I could see, the free version of ESXi couldn't do much of anything with virtual networks. <snip >
Click to expand...

Do what? I really don't get this, what can't it do?

vSphere Client -> ESXi server, then on the left hand side in the GUI, click on the ESXi host, and on the right hand side click the configuration tab, then the networking option below that to see the virtual switches. You can create virtual switches backed by NICs, or not, and create port groups to tag VLAN traffic, etc.
 
The only thing that the free version can't do with networking is jumbo frames.
 
defuseme2k said:
Do what? I really don't get this, what can't it do?

vSphere Client -> ESXi server, then on the left hand side in the GUI, click on the ESXi host, and on the right hand side click the configuration tab, then the networking option below that to see the virtual switches. You can create virtual switches backed by NICs, or not, and create port groups to tag VLAN traffic, etc.
Click to expand...

I'll look into this more when I get home.
 
I'm running Hyper-V at home. I guess using it depends on whether you have access to a Server license or not.

I like that it's all VHD based (so I can use disk2vhd or move the VHD to a physical box), and Dynamic Memory is pretty kick ass. I can set all of my VMs to 512MB and then let them change dynamically up to 2GB or whatever limit I decide on. Usually I set DCs to a gig, max, SQL to 2GB, etc. I've had 22VMs running on my home machine while sitting at about 80% memory usage (there's 24GB in the box).

That said, the only other product I've used is vSphere. I haven't used ESXi.
 
I actually do have a legal license for Server2k8R2, it's what BES is going to be installed on. After moving around ESXi a bit I have decided it's likely what I will go with.
 
ChrisCanada said:
I actually do have a legal license for Server2k8R2, it's what BES is going to be installed on. After moving around ESXi a bit I have decided it's likely what I will go with.
Click to expand...

If it's an enterprise license you can install Hyper-V as the parent and have 4 win2k8 vm's on the same box.
 
Eickst said:
If it's an enterprise license you can install Hyper-V as the parent and have 4 win2k8 vm's on the same box.
Click to expand...

Standard = 1 Host + 1 VM
Enterprise = 1 Host + 4 VM's
Database = However many Procs you bought a license for + Unlimited VM's
 
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