Virtual machine host spec

philjayj

philjayj

philjayj

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Hi Guys

I am looking to put a virtual machine host system together, and thought I would stop by and ask for some advice.

I want to build the physical machine, and run about 4 virtual machines off it. The machine will run a mixture of Server 2003/08, Vista and XP Pro OSs - and SQL Server 2005 will most likely be installed on one of those.

Now I know that the more RAM the better (I was looking at buying 8GB of DDR2) and dedicated hard drives for each virtual machine, but is there anything else you can recommend that would increase the performance of each virtual machine?

I already have a motherboard - its an Intel DG33TL.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
 
Which virtulisation software are you looking to use? If it is a machine that wil be used at work we are going to be using VMware ESX server. However this is not free. If you go for one of the new quad core cpu's such the Intel 9xxx range then these have instruction sets in the processor to aid with virtual machines.
 
Mogwai, thanks for replying. Although I do have a licence for ESX, the hardware requirements are way beyond my budget - I believe it requires dual CPUs etc. I think for the time being I will just use VMware Virtual Server.
 
A lot depends on the performance that you are expecting from the VMs. Is this a 'production' box or just for your testing/playing purposes ??

For example, I run my main PC as dual boot into Windows 2003 Server x64 for VM use, running the free version of VMWare server. With my spec (QX6700, 8GB RAM, 1.5 TB disk in total) I have a total of 26 VMs on the box of which I can comfortably run 10+ simultaneously for testing purposes; this includes a load of DCs, SharePoint, SQL Server, Exchange, ISA, workstations, etc. However I doubt my spec would be able to satisfy that load for a production purpose, but plenty good enough for my testing/development purposes.

VMWare Server is fine for basic use, but again this really depends on what it is being used for and what support you expect from the vendor.
 
Thanks for your reply Gazza. Its not a production machine, it will be mainly for pre-production testing etc.

At the most, I will have about 4 or 5 VMs running off the host machine. These will include basic setups such as Windows XP or Vista Ultimate. But I will also have VMs running Windows Server 2003/2008 with SQL Server 2005 installed on them.

Although the system will be for pre-production testing, some of the test SQL databases are a few hundred GBs. So with that in mind, I would want to avoid any slow response times.

I have been told that dedicating each VM its own hard drive is a good way to go - maybe a Raptor? And also give each VM its own dedicated NIC - i'm not sure about the dedicated NIC because I cant see myself saturating the bandwidth of a NIC.

Oh, and I do have a licence for VMware ESX - but from what I understand, what is essentially a desktop PC acting as a server is not enough to run ESX?

What do you think on the above?

Many thanks
 
I run esx 3i @ home. :)
Its an intel matx board, q6600 with 8gb ram.
Esx didnt recognize the onboard sata so no disks are fitted, the images are stored on an nfs & iscsi nas (Thecus 5200pro). The server boots off a usb stick.
Performance is very very good despite the storage being over the gigabit lan, considerably better than when it ran 2k3 server with the free version of vmware & local storage.
Currently I have 7 'critical' virtual machine running, mail, exchange, dc, citrix, sun, terminal server, isa + various machine I turn on & off as required.
The server could easily run many more than this, looking at the stats vmware is using 42% of the memory & cpu is averaging 14%
 
m cozzy, am I right in saying that ESx 3i replaces the need for an operating system (such as Windows Server 2003) on the host machine?

Thanks
 
Yes it does.
3i is the latest version of vmware hypervisor & can either be installed to disk as esx is now or it can be ran straight off a usb stick.
It is then managed via the virtual infrastructure client.
 
Does the virtual infrastructure client install onto the host when I install ESX? Also, when I donwload ESX, should I download ESX or ESXi?

Thanks for your help.
 
Ahh they have changed the name, its now called ESXi 3.5. You will need to download the installable version.
You can then boot & install from this cd or use the method below to create a bootable usb key.
The vi client is included & can be downloaded from the hosts webpage once installed.
A 60 day demo license can be used for testing.

NOTE - when I did this it was called 3i still but I assume the steps are still the same.

Perform the following steps to create a bootable ESX Server 3i USB flash drive:

Download ESX Server 3i Installable ISO
Extract INSTALL.TGZ from the root directory of the ISO image using Winrar
Extract /usr/lib/vmware/installer/VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0-67921.i386.dd.bz2 from INSTALL.TGZ using Winrar
Extract VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0-67921.i386.dd from VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0-67921.i386.dd.bz2
Attach the USB flash drive and make sure you no longer need the data on it
Use Win Image to transfer VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0-67921.i386.dd image to the USB flash drive
Disk->Restore Virtual Hard Disk image on physical drive…
Select the USB flash drive (Warning: If you select the wrong disk you will lose data!)
Select the image file .vhd (you just converted)
Confirm the warning message
Wait for the transfer to complete
Unplug the USB flash drive (Warning: If you forget to unplug the flash drive from the PC you might lose the data on your hard drives the next time you boot!)
Attach the USB flash drive to the machine you want to boot (Warning: If ESX Server 3i recognizes local drives, you might lose the data on it, so make sure you don´t need it anymore or unplug all hard drives!) (This is not tested yet...)
Turn the machine on and make sure the USB flash drive is selected as boot device
Watch ESX Server 3i boot
Configure
Enjoy!
 
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