Which VM solution? Hyper-V, ESXi, Xen?

[eagleknight]

I am having a hard time trying to figure out which option is the best for my situation. After searching and reading it has left me confused on some features..

My WHS is currently configured on 2 x 320GB RAID 1 through my mobo RAID. With two additional 1TB drives.

I purchased the following to switch my WHS to VM and to run some other VM's (video encoding and possible media server) along with wanting to upgrade my RAM....
- Gigabyte GA-880GM-UD2H
- AMD Phenom II X4 840
- 8GB (2 x 4GB)

Does all three of the VM's not support Fake-RAID? I have only found in Xen FAQ's that it does not support fake-RAID.

If I am not running RAID 1 for the VM Host and the WHS system drive what are my other options for backup of the VM Host and settings along with the WHS system drive. Is it possible to create two virtual disks and run RAID 1 inside a VM Guest?

Power management is my other concern. It will be on 24/7, but is there any special attention needed by the VM Host or does the mobo take care of this?

Unless I go the route of a 64-bit Linux as the host.

Thanks for the advice... much appreciated.

 

[Thuleman]

Does all three of the VM's not support Fake-RAID? I have only found in Xen FAQ's that it does not support fake-RAID.

Windows/Hyper-V will support onboard RAID.

If I am not running RAID 1 for the VM Host and the WHS system drive what are my other options for backup of the VM Host and settings along with the WHS system drive. Is it possible to create two virtual disks and run RAID 1 inside a VM Guest?

If your guest supports OS supports software RAID and you give the guest two physical HDDs then yes, you can run RAID 1 inside the VM. Technically you can even do it if you give it two virtual disks that are on the same physical disk but that does defeat the purpose I'd assume.

Power management is my other concern. It will be on 24/7, but is there any special attention needed by the VM Host or does the mobo take care of this?

Don't set Windows to automatically restart after applying updates, get a UPS? The VM host doesn't care whether it's running 24/7.

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Your disk I/O will be the primary bottleneck in anything you do, especially if you want to do video encoding. If it were me then I'd probably just run ESXi from a USB stick and forget about any kind of RAID.

 

[/dev/null]

I'd try proxmox ve personally....
I have a thread in the proxmox forums on how to migrate from a single disk to (soft) raid with no downtime. 10 minutes to setup.

 

[eagleknight]

Windows/Hyper-V will support onboard RAID.


If your guest supports OS supports software RAID and you give the guest two physical HDDs then yes, you can run RAID 1 inside the VM. Technically you can even do it if you give it two virtual disks that are on the same physical disk but that does defeat the purpose I'd assume.

What if I ditch the RAID 1 for the host. Can two identical VHD's be created and assigned to a guest VM and RAID 1 be configured inside? Or should I use snapshots?

 

[Chilly]

What if I ditch the RAID 1 for the host. Can two identical VHD's be created and assigned to a guest VM and RAID 1 be configured inside?

Yes; you could do RAID with pretty much any software raid solution provided by Windows/Linux/etc using any Hypervisor(Xen, HyperV, EXSi, etc), however it would be for the storage drives only, not for the OS drives of the virtual machines. Just note, Windows software RAID(not to be confused with fakeRAID) is horribly slow.

Disk I/O is going to be your biggest bottleneck.

 

[MassiveOverkill]

Windows/Hyper-V will support onboard RAID.

as will ESXi/Vsphere on the the Intel ICHRx chipset. My Asus P5E-VM HDMI whitebox recognizes it......just needed to install an Intel NIC. Not sure about AMD, but if there are RHEL drivers for it, then chances are ESXi/Vsphere can be made to work with it.

 

[zpackrat]

You can always create two RDM's in ESXi from the ICHRx to the guest, and then mirror them in Windows. You should in this case wind up with disks than can be read directly from a windows system if needed.

 

[Thuleman]

Just note, Windows software RAID(not to be confused with fakeRAID) is horribly slow.

It's all relative. Ockie, the "storage king", here in the Storage Forum is running all his however many dozens of TBs using Windows software raid because he doesn't want to deal with controllers and his benchmarks show the software raid being about some 12-15% slower than hardware raid.

 

[eagleknight]

I tried ESXi, but it is too hardware strict and couldn;'t get it to install. I have Hyper-V running now, but it is a pain to get the remote management console working. I think I am just going to leave the firewall off since it is only a home network.

 

[eagleknight]

Well after more tinkering with Hyper-V it is just too damn hard to setup and manage. What a pain. I can connect through the Hyper-V tools, but now stuck on how do I manage my actual disks and format them.

 

[MrFace]

VMware has a matrix that gives you a list of compatible hardware.

 

[Silent.Sin]

Well after more tinkering with Hyper-V it is just too damn hard to setup and manage. What a pain. I can connect through the Hyper-V tools, but now stuck on how do I manage my actual disks and format them.

Do you mean the actual disks installed in the Hyper-V server box? I'm assuming you installed Hyper-V to its own disk (or array) and that you wish to store your vhd's on another drive that was not formatted during the Hyper-V install and does not show up because it is not yet initialized.

If that is the case what you want to do is open up Computer Management from any Windows PC on your network. Right click on the top node in the left-hand panel which should look something like "Computer Management (<computername>)" and then click Connect to another computer... You should be able to connect to your Hyper-V server if you've enabled all of the proper remote management options. Then Storage | Disk Management should work the same as if you were doing it from your local PC.

I agree that windows admin can be all over the damn place sometimes, but compared to my experience with whitebox ESXi its a walk in the park. The major issues I've run into with Hyper-V were figuring out how to get Hyper V Manager to even install on Windows 7 SP1 (apparently it isn't supported by the currently distributed RSAT installer so you have to hack your way around it linky for anyone interested). Also had some issues getting it to work with UNC shares but I've managed to resolve that also. Getting the remote management and remote storage working for ESXi was a much more daunting task, especially for a guy with no Linux experience.

I've just started to use Hyper-V Server and only have a Win2k8 R2 and Win2k3 VM installed so far, but it seems to be running smoothly. One thing I have noticed that is lacking is the Hyper V Manager tool...vSphere kicks its ass six ways to Sunday in terms of manageability, MS needs to overhaul that and fast.

Can't comment on Xen as I don't have a server running that (yet...)

Hyper-V
Pros:
"Lightweight" compared to other Windows server OSes
Driver compatibility out the arse = good for NICs and chipset RAID
Familiar interfaces for Windows admins

Cons:
More resource intensive than ESXi
Hyper-V Manager is lacking
Quirky support for guest OSes and remote management
Windows Updates/Security vulnerabilities

ESXi
Pros:
Extremely light, uses almost nothing on the host box
Large community for support and 3rd party tools for almost anything imaginable
vSphere is much more mature and usable than Hyper-V Manager

Cons:
Limited hardware compatibility, especially with NICs and RAID
Initial configuration has a steep learning curve
Majority of industry buzz-worthy features only available in paid versions

 

[Olga-SAN]

Just mu 0.02$ if you don't mind On a moderate hardware performance difference between HV and ESX is close to being called missing. And EMC / VMware support less and less hardware with every release for some reason ;99((