Virtual Machine config

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Discussion

TheAngryDog

Original Poster:

12,418 posts

210 months

Saturday 29th August 2015
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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.

TheAngryDog

Original Poster:

12,418 posts

210 months

Sunday 30th August 2015
quotequote all
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.

TheAngryDog

Original Poster:

12,418 posts

210 months

Sunday 30th August 2015
quotequote all
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?

TheAngryDog

Original Poster:

12,418 posts

210 months

Monday 31st August 2015
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At the moment I just want to learn new skills lol.

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

TheAngryDog

Original Poster:

12,418 posts

210 months

Thursday 1st October 2015
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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.