Test server at home VMware or Hyper-V

RazorBlade

RazorBlade

RazorBlade

Associate
Joined
20 Mar 2011
Posts
15
I have a test server at home that I use mainly for testing. I use it however also for my home network. Recently my Highpoint 4 port RAID controller broke down. First I thought it was a harddisk that gone bad but replacing the harddisk did not help. As far as I can see it now it was the RAID controller. I bought a new one, which is an 8 port controller and a bit more proffesional. (3Ware 9690SA-i8) I am currently making sure that my data backups on an external USB disk are correct.

After this I want to start from scratch. I intend to create an RAID 5 with 7 1.5 TB disks and carve out LUN's as I need them. The most used VM's that I use for my home network will get a RAW mapping to the lun's, the VM's that I use purely to test new things out will get a .vhd or .vmdk file.

I am doubting however about the hypervisor. So far I used Hyper-V. One of the reasons was that I doubted if my High-point RAID controller was suported by VMWare. The 3Ware is however suported. If I would go for VMware vSphere then the main reason would be that I also use VMware Workstation on my laptop. I could then create the VM's on my laptop and later move them to my server. The reason I would go for Hyper-V is that I can only get a free ESXi license from VMWare. So I would not get a vCenter license. I don't think either that without a vcenter I could use SCVMM. Can anybody confirm this?

I would like to ask what the main limitations are of a free ESXi license compared to a full Windows 2008R2 datacenter Hyper-V license. I use VMware at work but there I have the enterprise license with a virtual center server.
 
Given you have only a single box, I'd say the majority of the benefits are moot. A quick search on vmware web site will detail the differences.
 
http://www.microsoft.com/hyper-v-server/en/us/default.aspx

To host Hyper V is free. It is the additional OS license which is important:
Standard = 1
Enterprise = 4
Datacentre = unlimited

Datacentre however is also license per CPU so it can get expensive.

Like Mike says V Centre is only useful when supporting more than one host. On one host it becomes almost irrelevant. VMware have crippled the free version in that you cannot use some snap shot products such as Veeam but you should be also to use Symantec System Recovery as it is installed within the host itself.
BTW, you can install VMware full fat boy on a temporary license for about 45 days.
 
For the Microsoft licenses I have a Technet account. I don't use the Microsoft licenses in a production enviroment but use them to learn the products.

Sofar I used SCVMM to create VM's. I have a few templates and it takes about 6 minutes to enroll a Windows 2008R2 machine and connect it to the domain with a powershell script. I know that you can also use SCVMM with vSphere but I doubt if you can use it without virtual center.

If you can't use snapshots with ESXi then it is pretty useless for me. Because it is a test system I use snapshots frequently. I think I will go with Hyper-V.
 
As the man said, snapshots work fine with the free ESXi license key. It's the fancy stuff that gets disabled; things like hardware hot add for VMs. i.e if you want to add an extra virtual NIC or hard disk to a VM you need to power it off first.

Also no vCenter = no deploying VMs from templates which to my mind is the biggest limitation of the free ESXi. You can do a poor mans deploy from template by using the VMWare Standalone Convertor to deploy and clone VMs but it's not quite as nice or as quick.

If you install ESXi to a USB stick though you can just reinstall every 60 days keeping the hard drive contents intact which lets you keep it in permanent evaluation mode and have all the features. You can deploy vCenter within a VM and do the same thing. It doesn't take that long to reinstall every 60 days and just reregister any templates you have.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom