bare metal VM hypervisor on a home made PC?

MossyUK

MossyUK

MossyUK

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I would like to consolidate all my disparate VM boxes into my old games PC. Is that even possible?

Basically, I have three old PC's running various VM's that are up pretty much 24/7. Each box PC has a host OS which consumes RAM, CPU etc and all three are old crappy ebay boxes I want to turn off to save power and free up some space. Also the heat is going to be a problem come summer.

So I am wanting to upgrade my games PC - a Q6600, 8gb RAM, ASUS P5Q (I think!) to sandybridge. I figure moving three old PC's to one is a good consolidation ratio and this should probably work if I can remove the host OS from my old games PC.

So is it possible to install ESXi or any other hypervisor OS on to a regular desktop PC? I am aware there could be a requirement for a RAID controller or off-box storage even.

I figure this must be possible though for people to practice VMWare when training for VCP?

Any help appreciated.
 
Not 100% sure on ESXi, but Hyper-V will certainly go on; it's exactly what I'm doing at the moment with a machine using that CPU and amount of memory. :)
 
Cheers for the quick and promising reply.

http://www.microsoft.com/hyper-v-server/en/us/default.aspx

That what you're using?

It's weird but I would prefer to use VMWare - just to get a head start on doing the VCP exam I guess.

Still, this looks like it should be perfect if theres no VMWare solution doing.

Do hyper V servers need a 1gb graphics card? :eek::D My games PC may be kinda overkill on the graphics card department for a VM server :) hehe
 
Yeah, that's it. I'm only running it as a test at the moment; I have ESXi downloaded, just haven't tried it yet. :P

Just to make you aware, it can't be managed locally as far as I'm aware. You'll need a suitable client (Vista or 7) with one of the management tools (I use the Hyper-V MMC which is part of RSAT). :)
 
That's cool - and cheers for the heads up. I will use the new games PC to manage it, or a VM on the games machine... arghhh VM sprawl! :)
 
ESXi may well work but you would need to look at the whitebox HCLs particularly around the areas of disk controllers and network adaptors, (my little Shuttle ESXi box had to gain an Intel lan card to be able to run it)

Management is from another machine running the vsphere client.
 
ESXi should run on your setup, you might have to run 3.5 though and you'll need to get another NIC after looking through the HCL.
 
Yes mate it will run fine

I am running:

Zenoss server / wordpress / joomla - CentOS 5.5
Avaya contact center reporting server - RHEL 5.5 64bit
Oracle 11g enterprise 32bit - RHEL 5.6 32bit (dont ask why!)

.........on my gaming rig: quad core 3.2ghz AMD, 8gb ram all on crappy vmware free server (on windows 7 64bit) also forget hyper-v, get xenserver or esxi

so yes, easy, no problem.
 
Try and find the model of your P5Q. I had a q9550 on a P5Q-E as my main ESXi box for the last year and a Q6600 and 8GB should have no probs. You might need to do a bit of guide reading but you want to get ESXi 4.1 update 1 hypervisor onto a bootable USB stick and run it from the stick from then on. ESXi should be able to see any locally attached SATA drives which can you use as datastores. You'll need to install a VMware client on a PC which will allow you to connect and configure your ESXi host which is running off the USB stick. From your other PCs, you can run VMware Converter which will transfer your Vms over to the ESXi box and store them in he datastores. All this software is free, and available on their site.

Hope that helps
 
I built this beast over the weekend. Spent weeks researching the bloody build but am well happy it's finally done. Just need a RAID solution now which is the next mission of mine.

esxi.jpg


Intel Core i7 960 3.20Ghz (Nehalem) (Socket LGA1366)
Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R Intel X58 (Socket 1366) DDR3 Motherboard
Corsair Vengeance 12GB (3x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Triple Channel Kit x 2
Fractal Design Define XL Full Tower Case - Black Pearl
Corsair Enthusiast Series TX 650W V2 High Performance Power Supply
Corsair Hydro H50-1 High-Performance CPU Watercooler (Socket LGA775/1155/1156/1366/AM2/AM3)
Akasa AK-FN058 Apache Black Super Silent 120mm Fan x 3
 
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If you are even partly tech savvy I would highly recommend taking a look at KVM, lower overheads than ESXi afaik and potentially more useful as you have a fully-fledged Linux box underneath it all, which may prove useful. Performance is also very good.
 
cheers all, managed to grab myself an Intel Pro 1000 nic off the bay of dreams over the weekend for a measly tenner.

I have some worries around the raid (onboard Asus P5q sata raid) but we will work through those issues as and when.

I don't want to go down the linux route if I can help it - though I appreciate the suggestion - purely because I don't use it in the day job and doing VMWare at home will make doing the VCP easier.

cheers
 
You can largely forget about using onboard RAID for consumer motherboards as ESXi won't work with it. It will just see each of your SATA drives as individual drives. You can look into picking up a hardware RAID card, but it has to be one that has been shown to work with ESXi as it's quite picky. The usual suspects are the Dell 5i and 6i, Adaptec 2405, LSI MegaRAID SAS/SAA 9240-8i etc. but as always, there are caveats to how well they will work with your mobo, whether you can use a battery backup unit. I'm in a similar boat and as my knowledge of this area is a bit patchy, I've had to discount all the above due to one thing or another. I'm now looking at running FreeNAS inside a VM which will connect to the SATA drives using raw device mapping as my mobo doesn't support VT-D. Wish I'd got a different board now to be honest.

madman045 - have you got a BBU for that Perc 5i and have you added any additional cooling for it?
 
Yes I have added a small chipset fan to the existing heatsink and a 120mm fan blowing directly onto the card from the side of the case.

And yes it does also have the BBU fitted and I upgraded the ram to 512mb

And yes SBS 2011 still takes ages to install, and I tried both thick and thin provisioning

120GB disk with 8GB ram assigned
 
Do you think the newer versions of esxi, 4.1 onwards would run on normal pc hardware? Reason I'm asking is, I got an old dell poweredge 1750 from work that currently had 3.5 on, works fine but is obviously very noisy and can't upgrade to 4.1 as it's not a 64bit chipset.

I'm thinking I might upgrade my hardware and use this machine, core2duo, 2gb ram etc for a play around vmware box, hopefully with 4.1/4.2 on, do you think that work?
 
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