Virtualization for Dummies: What to do?

[TeleFragger]

travis - well i dont think that is going to work well.. while virtual is nice..
remember... low powered and replace a few machines is not going to happen... now you can run a semi powerful machine and a few vms that will replace a few physical boxes... but remember... you need a beefier machine to run a few vms...

also your thinking a world that doesnt exist yet.. while it is nice to speculate that hs3 will require little.. we havent seen it yet so not sure...

[travisdh]

That is very true, I am thinking ahead as i need a project lol and trying to at least anticipate what the requirements might be. I have run virtualisation before, however the 'green' benefit associated with this is really as a result of reducing the number of PC's running and consolidating them into the one machine, which can afford to be beefier and consume more power because all things being equal if you replace 5 separate machines with one it is still likely to consume less power than the alternative of five separate machines.

That said i am still interested in looking into VMWARE, as i would be keen to set up a few virtual machines to run things like a file server, even a camera server but would need to build a machine to do this.

Out of interest what is the (rough) power usage on your VMWARE or Virtualized machines?

[thetonyg]

You might also consider Atom PCs in your virtualization strategy. A lot of them are in the ~20w range of power usage and only need a stick of inexpensive RAM plus storage. It can make sense to slice off a machine onto an Atom PC if it lets your beefier virtualization box sleep some hours of the day, park CPU cores, or park the hard drives.

In my case, I moved away from virtualization so I could put my always on services onto Atom (HS, DNS, DHCP, domain controller, etc.), and let the massive 24 hard drive beast sleep about 12 hours a day.

[skybolt]

For what it is worth I am now running HS Pro on an atom (See Sig) and it never even breaks a sweat, can't remember when I last rebooted it. I am looking into getting this into a Hyper-v cenerio along with 7MC (Sadly- SageTv is now dead for the most part).

I am very happy with the atom solution but I would ber happier with it in one of my virtuals. I need to figure out the multiple sound card issue, I use the server for the speaking proxy through my elk setup. Worst case I guess I could run it on the main Hyper-V server but that is not my first option.

[Moskus]

Finally upgraded from VMware Server 2.0 to ESXi 5.1. The change was bigger then I expected.

[TeleFragger]

Finally upgraded from VMware Server 2.0 to ESXi 5.1. The change was bigger then I expected.

im running 5.1 also.. really nice...
im not running HS in it though... im using it for other things...

dell poweredge 840... quadcore xeon... 8gb ram... 4x500gb hotswap drives... LOVEN IT!!!!!!!

[Moskus]

I only wish I knew more about RAID and stuff like that. Now I only have one drive, and I really had to struggle to make ESXi run on my HP xw4550.

Hoping for more knowledge soon...

[Pete]

Magnus,

Really Raid is just a level of resilence and how many drives you want to commit to said resilence. I have two NAS boxes which are at Raid 5 with hot drives in standby mode. Rest mostly in a Raid 2 (mirror) configuration. Its a balance though between performance and resilence. The raid 5 box is used for mostly video streaming & storage these days and it does just fine with 1080 HD movies on the Gb lan.

It used to be than a hardware level card Raid configuration was faster than a software level raid configuration. Today its really not too different. IE: I configured the IBM 1015 SATA3 PCiE X 8 - 8 port raid card in a software raid even though it was part of the basic OS.

I reflashed the IBM 1015 to suit my needs; easy to do and the card was only about $50 refurbished and now considered "old" technology.

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/tips0740.html

[Moskus]

Really Raid is just a level of resilence and how many drives you want to commit to said resilence. I have two NAS boxes which are at Raid 5 with hot drives in standby mode. Rest mostly in a Raid 2 (mirror) configuration. Its a balance though between performance and resilence. The raid 5 box is used for mostly video streaming & stora

That's basically what I know. But I have no experience with setting it up, and no experience what so ever with using it with ESXi in terms of hardware needed and such.

I understand that it's possible to have the virtual machine on a datastore on a NAS, but it might not be as easy to set up as I'd like.

But now I have no method of backing up my virtual hard drives on my ESXi machine, and I don't like the feeling. Actually, it's freaking me out a little...

[Pete]

The propietary cmd line commands are written kind of cryptically unless you are really familiar with it.

Personally I always either was moving rarely utilized or simple function servers into the virtual world so at the time more into the virtual machines themselves and what they could do for my testing and use.

I would over see though the addition of network interfaces and storage and it seemed straight forward utilizing the console GUI; always wanted it yesterday; never fast enough for me. (even though it would take only about 10 minutes).

Maybe setting up a second ESXi machine just to play with with nothing important on it such that you can break it et al might give you the opportunity to test out stuff without messing any "production" stuff might help.

[TeleFragger]

well i had.. and said had because i started tearing it apart.. but may put it back together again..

a dell poweredge 840 as listed above.. a dell optiplex 745, 755, 760 all SFF (small form factor).. had them all running hypervisor 5i...
really cool... 1 with all my servers running... 1 with 4 XP vms... 1 with Win 7 vms... and 1 trying to get working as some kind of nas.. freenas or the sort..

since it is free.. it is nice.. at my last job we had a hp c7000 chassis with 16 blades that were dual Cpu 12 cores each and 256gb ram connected to a san..

then vmware vcenter was used to organize ALL of them into 1 management console..

that is how you play..

vcenter.. create a data center.. add all servers....
put all vms on a central storage location..

with vms up you can move the vm's to different servers while they are still running (vmotion).. get them off the servers and then can go into maintenance mode and reboot servers...

but now with me just having no vcenter.. i have to console into each.. what a pita!!!!!!!

[TeleFragger]

oh and if your bored...

great reads.. one of my blades are in there somewhere.. forget what page..



http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1376255

[Moskus]

Maybe setting up a second ESXi machine just to play with with nothing important on it such that you can break it et al might give you the opportunity to test out stuff without messing any "production" stuff might help.

Yes, I tink I'll do just that. I need to learn the basic.

It seems that every time I open a new door there's so much new to learn. But I really think I should be grateful for that.
But it takes time, and I don't have too much of that at the moment.

[TeleFragger]

...But it takes time, and I don't have too much of that at the moment.

join the club...
i work 60 miles away.. so when i get home.. i have to take kid A 20 miles to get soccer pics done.. then on way back.. trade kid A for kid B so the wife can take Kid A to soccer practice and I take kid B to practice (i coach him)...

saturday and sunday are soccer games... sunday is travel... thank goodness hockey ended... but will start soon...!!!!
hurt my back and leg... so havent been able to do anything lately... grrrrr

[pbibm]

I think this is why the population of the Eldery Gentlemen's club is so high on HS. You do need time to explore, learn, make things work while not knocking your house out of the water.

Truth be told, I have one in college and one senior in high school so I am entering the realm of having more time. I am tippy toeing up on joining the Elderly Gentleman's Club group and probably guilty of denial.....