Virtualisation - VMware or HyperV?

[Greg Ashe]

Subject line says it all.

Any views on this? Looking to consolidate 4 Dell servers and 2 Linux servers...

-- gpa

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Think before you print.

[nils]

Hi,

Have a look at http://www.proxmox.com/ I use it in production, it's easy to setup and install the documentation is quite good and pretty easy.

http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Downloads#Proxmox_Virtual_Environment_2.3_.28ISO_Image.29

Regards,

Nils
 

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[Eugene Eichelberger]

I'd recommend KVM or XEN.

[nils]

Hi Proxmox uses KVM and it comes with a nice web interface, but it will need a CPU with virtualisation capabilities.

Regards,

Nils

On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 11:26 PM, Eugene Eichelberger <gei...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'd recommend KVM or XEN.

[Michael O'Brien]

Can't speak for hyperV but if you are looking at VMware hypervisor ESXi  which is free don't forget to check the Dell download side for your servers as you might be able to get a custom build of ESXi and other tools like the dell hardware monitoring for use with ESXi. Also check the VMware HCL to make sure your chosen physical hosts are capable of running ESXi and the drivers are available, there is also a community based list where others have gotten their hardware to run the hypervisor but VMware haven't tested it or approve it for production use or support by their staff 

If you go down the road of KVM maybe Ganeti could be useful for you http://code.google.com/p/ganeti/ as well as those already mentioned by others.

ESXi comes with a client to manage the vm's,guest networks and give you an indication of the consumed resources on that host but if you want to manage multiple hosts from 1 interface you start to into the area of vCenter which costs and includes support & updates but you get stuff like update manager,FT, live migration across hosts, across storage and/or across network connections plus other resource management tools. There is a trial version available on VMware if you're interested

 

You never said the number of physical hosts you want to end up with but I would recommend taking the opportunity whichever virtualisation route you take when consolidating your servers to go for a clean build of the guest vm's instead of a direct copy/cloning as you don't get legacy crud and drivers in your guest vm's OS for hardware it no longer needs and you can right-size your vm's to the vCPu, vRAM, vDisk they consume under your workload not the generic requirements specified by a software installer, you can easily add more to a guest if it needs it but no point wasting RAM or CPU allocation if it never uses it. Also don't forget to think about how you are going to backup your guest vm's and also don't forget about timing as your guest vm's no longer have access to a hardware based clock of their own and problems can arise if your guest os's times start to drift apart relative to each other especially if your guests are domain controllers and other roles sensitive to timing issues. It's very solve-able but just check the support material for your virtualisation platform to make sure you configure your guest os's the right way (usually involving syncing to a NTP server).

[Michael O'Brien]

Also if you do go with vmware you might find some useful tools on http://labs.vmware.com/flings like http://labs.vmware.com/flings/boomerang if you want to work with multiple hosts

[Greg Ashe]

Thanks for all the info - keep it coming...

-- gpa

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Have a nice day

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[Michael O'Brien]

Also you might have to research the windows licensing for your guest vm's as existing license keys might be tied to the hardware they came with and you may not be permitted to use the same license in a guest vm, I'm not a expert on it but I believe it depends on the version of windows server you have

[Power]

Had the same idea Greg but our server processors don't support Hardware V

On Thursday, 28 March 2013 20:57:42 UTC, Greg Ashe wrote:

[Clarke Rice]

Hi Michael,

Legally, yes you are right.

I can't be the only one who thinks "I bought it, I paid for it, I'll do what I jolly well like with it - that's my moral right". 

However, depending on the licence, MS products may check in with the mother-ship to see how many times you have activated the product.  So, a single-licence might stop working after a few activations on apparently different hardware (including different VMs).  If you are trying a couple of VM tools to compare, make sure this doesn't catch you out.  i.e. if you are trying a Windows VM on several host platforms, it might stop activating for you!  Site-licenses usually don't have this problem and assume you will manually count to check the number of installations doesn't exceed the licence (so you can install and uninstall all you like).

Clarke