Type 1 Hypervisor Choice

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Hi all,

I have recently acquired an older Dell Poweredge R300 1U server machine, and am looking to set it up as a DIY home server. The intention at the moment is that it will hold all of my media on a RAID1 pair of WD Red drives, as well as hosting Plex and anything else I can dream up/have time to learn!

My question is; which Hypervisor should I steer toward? I am aware I could just run an OS directly, but feel this is an opportunity to learn stuff, while getting a sweet server setup as well. As a long lived Linux user (mostly Arch), I have looked into the Xen system, but have also been recommended ESXi as Dell provide customised images for it. I intend to run the OS from a USB stick plugged into the internal USB port. Can someone please shed some light on this, and possibly provide some guidance?

Thanks in advance!
 
Soldato
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Having used both in the homelab, I'd steer to vSphere 6 as it has more features which benefit the home user, i.e. setting of auto-startup of VMs on boot, NFS support which is useful if you ever need to cleanse the drives as you can then back them off to another machine while you play around, and it can boot from a small USB stick.

Xenserver, however is completely free and includes many enterprise features for free.. I would say that PCI passthrough is more complete in Xenserver but is done via the command line and not the gui, and you can install a HTML based server manager for free (XO). It does have issues with backing up VMs in that they're unique to the install of Xenserver and using an NFS share to move them off means you have to play with the metadata to bring them back in to the host, in addition Xenserver cannot autostart VMs, so if the host crashes or resets then you have to manually start them or write a script which you can place in init.d to start them...

Xen follows similarly to xenserver except it doesn't use XAPI natively which makes it harder to manage in my experience.
 
Soldato
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I actually prefer Hyper-V to run VMs on an OS myself but the Hyper-V Core is pain to configure once installed on a bare metal server as it ideally needs both Server manager and Hyper-V manager running on another server. Though I've managed to configure it via a Windows 10 client.

I use ESXi at work and it should support your Dell server and is probably about the easiest Hypervisor to install and setup initially via the vSphere Client. The Web client isn't quite so pleasant to use.

Installing ESXi couldn't be easier as you can write the install ISO to a USB stick. Boot from the stick and then as ESXi automatically loads to RAM install back to the same USB stick which then becomes your boot drive. Reboot the server, do the basic IP config from the server console and then use a browser to down the vSphere client and use that to setup your initial storage and VMs.

The other distributions I've played with are unRAID and ProxMox but not Xenserver as of yet. They tend to require some amount of command configuring but you will be fine with that having used Arch and Linux extensively.

I've been playing with PCIE passthrough so I could run a software router for example with a dedicated WAN port and that all works fine. However when I was trying to get GPU and sound to passthrough to a VM client it was very hit n miss as the software side of it is still in the early stages in most distributions.
 
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Soldato
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XenServer can auto-start VMs, you have to do it by command line, but it is a vanilla feature and not something you have to write a script for.

How do you get XO for free though? :p

edit: oh found it, get the "trial" and just don't subscribe.
 
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Soldato
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XenServer can auto-start VMs, you have to do it by command line, but it is a vanilla feature and not something you have to write a script for.

How do you get XO for free though? :p

edit: oh found it, get the "trial" and just don't subscribe.

The command lines never worked for me and the citrix guys confirmed it was gone, but the cli version was still there for some reason... Haven't tried the latest beta though.
 
Soldato
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All the mentioned hypervisors are good, but esxi really is the best hypervisor by a country mile. It can be installed and configured in 30 mins, and is simple to upgrade. It's also easy to tinker with and very hard to break.
 
Soldato
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I don't run ESXi anymore but when I did I found it straight forward to use albeit with a learning curve. Having said that I was starting from scratch as I'd never even used a VM before... I now use Hyper-V on top of Server 2012 but only for lightweight VMs.
 
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All the mentioned hypervisors are good, but esxi really is the best hypervisor by a country mile. It can be installed and configured in 30 mins, and is simple to upgrade. It's also easy to tinker with and very hard to break.

I agree that Esxi is a great option and wouldn't hesitate to recommend it myself. However, my personal preference is for Proxmox. It's just as easy to use/upgrade and, unlike my experience with esxi, I have never had any issues with drivers.
 
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Thanks all for the insights. I have ended up on the Dell customised image of ESXi, and have managed to get myself up and running. My only real complaint so far with it is with some terminology I haven't come across before; most likely this is my first foray into Virtual Machines proper.

All the mentioned hypervisors are good, but esxi really is the best hypervisor by a country mile. It can be installed and configured in 30 mins, and is simple to upgrade. It's also easy to tinker with and very hard to break.

On the upgrade front, the latest version supplied from the Dell Support site is quite a long way behind the latest stable release (5.1 versus 6.0). The server is quite an old beastie; will there be any benefit to me as a home user looking to learn and explore, and will an upgrade even be possible on such old hardware?
 
Soldato
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upgrade my be ok, but your nic drivers might not work... Certainly my old e1000 based card didn't work on an old white box so that will be a question mark, although I think you might be able to inject them... vSphere 6 (and 5.5 for that matter) removed some of the limits of 5.1; 5.5 broke a large number of things too like USB passthrough but I don't know whether their fixed for 6 yet.
 
Caporegime
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It more or less doesn't matter. Hypervisors are commodities now, pick the one with the management workflow and applications that suit you. Or if you need to run third-party appliances and receive support, pick one from the list of supported ones.
 
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