Virtual Machine config

[TheAngryDog]

Would it be best to have a server acting as the VM Host and a NAS for storing the VM's on, or two servers?

Thanks.

[TurricanII]

Depends on your needs. In a production environment if you are looking for high availability with vmware or xenserver then a NAS with TWO hosts may be the way to go. Using a SAN/NAS storage box generally allows you to add much more storage where a server may be limited to four or eight disks, with you having to add extra hardware to have more disks. A problem is getting a fast enough transport between NAS and server. 10 gigabit ethernet is possibly the cheapest. With microsoft hyper-v, you can store a VM on one server with local disks and replicate it directly to a backup server. This good in that it avoids shared storage which makes it good for small businesses on a budget, and storing VM's on the local server tends to immediately give you rapid storage.

Edited by TurricanII on Saturday 29th August 22:14

[jjlynn27]

If this is for learning, (ie performance is not crucial), I'd create nested esxi environment (2 esxi hosts + storage (of or freenas presented as iscsi) then plonk guests between 2 hosts.

[TheAngryDog]

Thanks. Its for a home lab.

I have a HP G7 Microserver at the moment with esxi 5.5 on it. It has 4 gb of ram (looking to upgrade this to 8) but I think the limitation will be the CPU as well.

[colin79666]

TheAngryDog said:

Thanks. Its for a home lab.

I have a HP G7 Microserver at the moment with esxi 5.5 on it. It has 4 gb of ram (looking to upgrade this to 8) but I think the limitation will be the CPU as well.

In that case I'd suggest just sticking ESXi on a USB pen drive and running the VMs off 4 local drives in RAID 0. Back them up periodically to a NAS or USB drive as RAID 0 isn't too safe but it will give the best storage performance. You will need more RAM if running multiple guests at the same time. I think a G7 will take 16GB although you might get away with 8. CPU really depends on what guests you will be running and the kind of workload. It would be fine for running a couple of 2012 VMs and a couple of Windows 8.1 guests for MCSA training but it wouldn't do if you are running big databases with a high transaction throughput.

[TheAngryDog]

colin79666 said:

TheAngryDog said:

Thanks. Its for a home lab.

I have a HP G7 Microserver at the moment with esxi 5.5 on it. It has 4 gb of ram (looking to upgrade this to 8) but I think the limitation will be the CPU as well.

In that case I'd suggest just sticking ESXi on a USB pen drive and running the VMs off 4 local drives in RAID 0. Back them up periodically to a NAS or USB drive as RAID 0 isn't too safe but it will give the best storage performance. You will need more RAM if running multiple guests at the same time. I think a G7 will take 16GB although you might get away with 8. CPU really depends on what guests you will be running and the kind of workload. It would be fine for running a couple of 2012 VMs and a couple of Windows 8.1 guests for MCSA training but it wouldn't do if you are running big databases with a high transaction throughput.

I already boot from USB anyway, and it has 8gb RAM, I was half asleep when I wrote that post, so I am looking to put 16gb in it.
If I run RAID 0 across 4 2TB disc's, I could be needing a larger USB backup solution, and getting a NAS just for backups for a home setup seems an expensive way of doing it?

[Philemon]

Instead of buying another Microserver to use as a NAS, buy a third one of same generation and setup VSAN across three node ESXi cluster. 16GB easily and 128GB SSD's cheaply added. Add a 2 port Gigabit network card and you can link aggregate them on HP smart managed switch for the storage layer. Local disks in the servers aggregated into a VSAN shared storage.

This way your lab will represent the latest VMware vSphere iteration.

[bitchstewie]

For a home lab you can simulate both.

Use local storage because it's cheap, if you want to experiment with shared storage look at stuff like StoreVirtual and whatever Linux distro you like to serve up iSCSI or NFS.

I'll offer this up as something to think about, because it's something I see quite a bit even if it isn't relevant for a lab - people often buy a pair of solid enterprise grade servers from the likes of Dell or HP and then make the whole lot dependent on a single Netgear switch and a consumer grade NAS - bad idea

Shared storage done properly is very useful, but done on the cheap it's just a nightmare waiting to happen.

[TheAngryDog]

At the moment I just want to learn new skills lol.

I do not think I am at the Shared Storage level yet!

[bitchstewie]

That's fine, all I'm saying is that you don't need to spend a penny to be able to mimic and test it out

[TheAngryDog]

Just revisiting this. I only have a single use ESXi license so I wouldn't be able to use on two hosts?

My short term goal is basically to run a few Windows 2008 / 2012 servers, one acting as a media server, and possibly a Citrix Xen Desktop set up and a Linux distro. I realise that my current server isnt good enough for this, so I will need to invest in something better.

[rsbmw]

I believe the VMWare products give 60 days eval on setup. If your VM's are stored safely, you can rebuild this very quickly every 59 days and just re-import the VM's. i.e., run whatever you want!