• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Xenserver vs Hyper-V for home use

Bandalo

Bandalo

2[H]4U
Joined
Dec 15, 2010
Messages
2,657
I am currently running a small home server with Win2008R2. It runs on a Core i3, with 4GB, and a 300GB main OS drive, and a 6TB RAID 5 array on an old Acrea controller. Right now I run Hyper-V and run WHS v1 in a VM, strictly for the client-backup capability.

I'm considering upgrading the RAM and setting up a domain controller and a few other VMs in order to work on some certifications. I'm fairly new to virtualization.

Should I stick with 2008R2 as the base OS and just run the VM's in Hyper-V?

I've tried Xenserver on another machine, and it seems to work well. Would that be a better choice for long term? ESXi has problems with the motherboard, so that's not a good option.

I use this box as my main file server, and the wife uses it for all her pictures and videos, so that has to stay running 24/7. I was considering just building a separate box for this VM work, but it seems like I could do it with one machine and save power and $$ in the long run..
 
Hyper-V is probably best, since you can get flexible with the RAM and do thin provisioning.

Granted you can thin provision on local storage easy enough on XenServer 5.6 FP1.
 
It seems Xenserver has a ton more hardware support than VMware, but considerably less USER support. I may have to switch hardware and just get ESXi running..

Thanks for the assist!
 
Bandalo said:
It seems Xenserver has a ton more hardware support than VMware, but considerably less USER support. I may have to switch hardware and just get ESXi running..

Thanks for the assist!
Click to expand...

I was going to suggest ESXi over Hyper-V, smaller footprint and IMHO a better product (even though we are a Hyper-V house).
 
I use XenServer at work (licensed) and at home (free) and I can't say enough good things about it.

Citrix XenServer is based on Xen (free as well) and for Xen, there is a huge user base and support system.
 
corge said:
I use XenServer at work (licensed) and at home (free) and I can't say enough good things about it.

Citrix XenServer is based on Xen (free as well) and for Xen, there is a huge user base and support system.
Click to expand...

same here. I just upgraded my xenserver box to 8gb of ram. I'm only running two vm's at the moment, one windows server 2008 R2 as a file server and a debian linux vm I was playing with Zenoss with.
 
Bandalo said:
I am currently running a small home server with Win2008R2. It runs on a Core i3, with 4GB, and a 300GB main OS drive, and a 6TB RAID 5 array on an old Acrea controller. Right now I run Hyper-V and run WHS v1 in a VM, strictly for the client-backup capability.

I'm considering upgrading the RAM and setting up a domain controller and a few other VMs in order to work on some certifications. I'm fairly new to virtualization.

Should I stick with 2008R2 as the base OS and just run the VM's in Hyper-V?

I've tried Xenserver on another machine, and it seems to work well. Would that be a better choice for long term? ESXi has problems with the motherboard, so that's not a good option.

I use this box as my main file server, and the wife uses it for all her pictures and videos, so that has to stay running 24/7. I was considering just building a separate box for this VM work, but it seems like I could do it with one machine and save power and $$ in the long run..
Click to expand...

Currently I am running a server with 12GB of RAM and a 10TB usable Raid 5 array. I'm running Windows SBS 2011 Standard as the OS and I have two WHS VM's (v1 and v2) running for managing backups. The v1 server is my primary backup server while I am testing v2 as an eventual replacement.

It's allowing me great remote access using my own registered domain (even with Dynamic DNS). Web Mail, VPN, Remote Desktop....

I also run Twonky Server on it and stream my media remotely when I VPN in.

AsusWeb storage also runs on the server with no fuss, so I have a nice automatic off-site backup of critical files.

I was a little unsure about managing my own e-mail server at first, but it has been a relatively painless experience for me. Exchange access via outlook, locally and remotely, has been perfect and the Outlook Web Access is fantastic. I'm very happy with it so far. It's been up and running for about 6 months wtih no issues to speak of.
 
Well, I bit the bullet and did a few hardware upgrades. Intel Q67 MB with an i5-2400, 8GB of extra RAM, and an extra Intel gigabit NIC or two. I'm going to try ESXi with 2008R2 running a file server, and either WHS 2011 or SBS 2011.

I'd love to try the full features of SBS 2011, but I'm currently stationed out in Italy, and the internet is terrible for upload/streaming. I usually don't see much more than 5Mb/sec down, and only about 0.3-0.5Mb/sec upload. I move to California in a few months though, so once I get there, things will improve.

How are you handling the VPN aspect? I have a pfsense box as a router, but I haven't played with any of the VPN stuff yet.

Does Exchange let you handle POP3 type addresses on the server side? (i.e.,would it be able to pull in my Gmail / Yahoo, or would I need a domain name set up and have the Gmail just forward?)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top