Test server at home VMware or Hyper-V

[RazorBlade]

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.

 

[RazorBlade]

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.