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This install: Hyper-V or Vmware?

R

Ronco

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So I'm still in the stages of mulling over which to use for this install. I've been old-school until now, and a firm believer in throwing as much iron at a project as is feasible.

But now virtualisation is here - and I'm spending my own business's money for someone else :D - I'm looking to do it as cheaply as possible without affecting core reliability. The use is not completely mission-critical, but Very Important - i.e. we could tolerate some downtime, but in a general business sort of way we would rely on the machines almost completely. Hardware wise, I'm going for 24/7/365 4-hour support.

The plan is for two physical servers, with one running non-virtualised Windows Server 2003/8, and the other running a virtualised environment with Windows 2003 VM's at first. The VM's would be fairly small (<100Gb), self-contained machines with not much in the way of anything that needs to be shared between them and the reason for the VM's is simply that some of the services I plan to be running don't play nice with each other on a same-physical-server install. I expect up to 4 servers to be resident on the second server.This is for reasons of space as much as cost, but cost is the primary driver for virtualisation since we'll need at least three discrete servers at start but I don't want to pay for a third or fourth physical machine with the same setup / support as the two.

There will be no SANs, although a NAS might be present. Each machine will be equipped with a tape drive for backup, and regulations will mean that each day backups will be taken off-site - and therefore once again for cost reasons, tapes - and not using a robotic library - is the only way to do this. So for the second server, the tape will have to contain a one-hit backup of all the VM's with individual restore capability.

Now I've been looking at the various options available from VMWare, and it seems to me that the free / basic SME versions don't afford enough control especially over the data protection, and the comprehensive packages with data protection are way too expensive. I'm actually beginning to think it might be cheaper to keep them physical and find space to accommodate the machines.

Which, and what peripheral solutions, would you guys recommend in a similar situation?
 
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If you are going to virtualize windows server instances, then I would keep it hyper-v. Esp if you could get away with using Server 2008 instead of 2003 as it comes built in out of the box. Hyper-V plays real nice with Windows Server installs.

Without knowing what services in particular you are running or more details, I would suggest that with four servers (I'm assuming main install with hyper-v as a service plus 4 VMs) You're looking at quad cores (however you go about it with one CPU or two dual cores) and around 8gb RAM. However that could prove to be low end and the processing power might need to be stepped up.
 
I guess so. It'd be easiest to back up, presumably - directly on the machine. I've budgeted lobbing a dual-E5520 at it and 8 gigs.
 
any reason in particular for not wanting to virtualize the one box? at least if you had 2 servers you could run them in HA? Pretty easy to do fullvm backups with vmware virtual consolidated backup, and you could write a script to back up right to tape. while a SAN is ideal for the backups, you could go with a decent NAS and use NFS datastores.

I'd recommend vmware, but i"m pretty biased. I don't think there is any advantage running windows vm's on Microsoft products, the OS doesn't really care if it's running on physical or virtual hardware.
 
What J-Will is suggesting, if I understand correctly, that I don't go with the Hyper-V server and to just deploy the VM's under Windows Server 2008. As I said, the whole point of this exercise is to avoid 'box creep' and keep the virtualisation efforts contained within a single server - and I've been scratching my head for a while but an effective VMware implementation even given this relatively minor level of deployment seems to involve significant box creep to run and especially to back up. The situation seems to be simpler if I virtualise under WS2008.
 
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Correct, if planning to use all Windows Server VMs, using 2008 would be the easiest. It comes with Hyper-V as a service. And Hyper-V likes to virtualize other Server 2008 installs. Its all in the box in this type of situation, you just need to provide the proper amount of licenses, but it sounds like you only need 1 physical and 4 virtual ones. Depending on what services you run, you might be able to provide one of the VM services on the 'main' install with the Hyper-V service cutting it down to 3 VMs.

Now if you already have Server 2003 licenses, or images of server install using 2003, then thats a different situation, but again I would seggest Hyper-V since its still an all Microsoft solution. 2008 would still be your best bet if you can swing it.
 
Given the number of people who'll be working, that seems to be the most cost-effective solution: I'd buy Windows Server 2008 SBS Premium, then I can use the included copy of WS2008Std on the second dual-quad server to virtualise Windows Server 2003 instances. I can then look at either a scripted backup for a real po'boy solution, or more likely shell out for Backup Exec.

Sound right to you guys?
 
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