VM/Hypervisors - Where to start?

M3G4UK · 27 Jan 2014 at 16:01

Hi all,

Got a MicroServer kicking around indoors doing nothing so tempted to delve in to virtual machines and have a play. I know that the MicroServer won't be particularly gutsy but not sure I really need it for a play.

What's the industry standard/best HV software to learn with? Noticed a few at my work use vSphere, though I'm well aware others exist.

Cheers!

LostCorpse · 27 Jan 2014 at 18:29

VMwares offereings ESXI \ VSpere
Microsoft Hyper V
Citrix
Xen
i think are probably the main ones you'll incounter in the industry.

Personally i prefer VMWare, but i dont have much expirence with the others so its more down to lack of time from my view, but you can do some really funcy things with ESXI

Xelene · 27 Jan 2014 at 18:33

M3G4UK said:
Hi all,

Got a MicroServer kicking around indoors doing nothing so tempted to delve in to virtual machines and have a play. I know that the MicroServer won't be particularly gutsy but not sure I really need it for a play.

What's the industry standard/best HV software to learn with? Noticed a few at my work use vSphere, though I'm well aware others exist.

Cheers!

Out of the Industry standard traditional solutions, VMWare is the undisputed heavyweight. There's some Hyper-V and Xen kicking about too.

That stuff is kind of declining, the new new is IAAS/PAAS - look at Amazon AWS / Heroku respectively. AWS specifically gives you a years worth of free cloud stuff to play around with via their free tier.

Setting up something like Openstack might be an interesting home project.

DJMK4 · 27 Jan 2014 at 18:47

VMWare ESXi is good, I much rather prefer this over Hyper-V

VSphere is an application bundled with VMWare ESXi, ESXi is the actual hypervisor that you run on the server, VSphere is an application that you use to connect and manage your hypervisor with

bigredshark · 27 Jan 2014 at 20:28

DJMK4 said:
VMWare ESXi is good, I much rather prefer this over Hyper-V

VSphere is an application bundled with VMWare ESXi, ESXi is the actual hypervisor that you run on the server, VSphere is an application that you use to connect and manage your hypervisor with

Not quite, VSphere is the whole suite of products, of which ESXi is the hypervisor. VSphere *Client* is the management application...

Storage Applicance, Data protection and Replication are all also branded as VSphere 'x' applications...

capcave · 29 Jan 2014 at 23:01

vSphere Windows Client = Client software used by admins to connect to vCenter

vSphere vCenter = management server controlling ESXi hosts for things like vMotion, distributed switching etc.

ESXi = servers you run vms on

We run 50 CPUs of Enterprise Plus at the moment, if I had to start again I would seriously look at OpenStack or Xen. VMware for us has been rock solid apart from their new stupid single sign on service, but it is expensive. Is it worth it for your company only you can decide that.

To learn you can run VMware vSphere inside VMware workstation

Although you cant pass a VMware exam without attending their courses. Get yourself a free virtual SAN, decently powerful PC with 16GB or more RAM and play with it.

We tried Hyper-V 2008 R2, I dont care what the press says, its a waste of time. Management sucks, its very hardware specific and yes its free (apart from the hair pulling you will suffer)

Caged · 29 Jan 2014 at 23:20

OpenStack isn't a hypervisor, it's more of a cloud orchestrator platform that's open source and very rough around the edges. It can use the Xen hypervisor, but it's not a replacement for a company running internal resources on VMware and doesn't try to be.

vCloud will get there eventually, it will just take them a few attempts at starting from scratch before it does, but there is a much larger talent pool of people who can run VMware so your OpenStack licensing savings might be wiped out by salary costs.

I agree with Hyper-V though - it's an absolute mess to use unless you already run your environment in System Center. Even then it's just plan weird and frustrating, and just backwards compared to a lot of other platforms. It only recently started using virtual SCSI disks for example, before that it was all IDE.

capcave · 31 Jan 2014 at 12:35

Yes sorry you are absolutely right, OpenStack is another layer on top of the hypervisors. We've been struggling with creating vms in a timely manner so the automation is very important for us to get right. This is where Open Stack and others can help.

If you went down the VMware route then vCloud and all the other bits you need can get quite expensive, although yes there are many talented people able to help design and build it for you.

And we just signed up for another 4 years with VMware

zoomee · 31 Jan 2014 at 19:22

calm down, calm down! - vm geeks

lets take a step back - Is there a freebie / trial version of VMware / vcentre / vsphere that one could mess with?

In terms of hardware would my current setup work ok? [email protected] with 16Gb of RAM? - Do I need that hardware virtualisation stuff enabled in bios - is it VT-d or something? Hardly use my PC and we got a HUUUUUGE vm setup at work but I darn't play with it - just thinking of setting something up at home to get started with, then go for some official training with exam later. We're kick starting what looks like a potential VDI deployment at work too and having only been in infrastructure a couple of years its all a bit daunting coming from a desktop background!

Had someone in today talking about VDI and man there's so much to learn!....

Some newbie links would be great also - thanks in advance.

Semple · 31 Jan 2014 at 20:10

VMWare do a number of trials but i'm not sure what trial software they have around the ESXi suite.

Your spec should be fine. Also if you have admin privs for ESX/vCenter and enough resources to play around, then have a play around. Sectioning off a pool for VMs to experiment with will keep them separate from the ones that have a real purpose.

zoomee · 1 Feb 2014 at 12:05

ta bud - yes I've got admin priv but no way I wanna take the heat for breaking something lol.

much safer and I think more learning capabilities if I start from a scratch. Four VM servers on an SSD should be good yeah?

Xelene · 3 Feb 2014 at 18:16

zoomee said:
ta bud - yes I've got admin priv but no way I wanna take the heat for breaking something lol.

much safer and I think more learning capabilities if I start from a scratch. Four VM servers on an SSD should be good yeah?

If you are cloning them all off the same base image then a good Hypervisor / Filesystem should be able to do some degree of deduplication. An SSD will handle way more than 4 VM's (depending on size obviously) as they excel at workloads with high queue depths, fast random access. Spinning rust is better at high sustained (contiguous) file transfer but for your use cases... (Spinning rust can be nice and fast with lots of heads working in tandem).

As for my comment about Openstack, it's more a nod towards the way things are going with IAAS these days. It's probably better to cut out the middle man in this case and just get yourself an AWS free account.