It looks like I'll be building my first virtual servers soon. I asked Mr Google some generic questions about VMware and there was lots of crap to wade through so I thought the geeks on the board might point me in the right direction. Scenario: Client is upgrading to a version of Great Plains accounting software that has to run as 64 bit. The client currently has two 32 bit servers so it looks like we're shopping for a new box. Great Plains will be using SQL and there will be some remote users accessing it via Terminal Server. (No terminal server in this environment as of now). I'm told that installing SQL and Terminal Server on the same box is a bad idea. The Great Plains vendors however tell me that running one physical server with two virtual servers (SQL and Terminal Server) is a common scenario for them. So school me on the whole virtual server thing. First I found that VMware has lots of products ... what do I need? Also, I'm sure Microsoft has a similar virtualization product .... is it worth investigating? Does the VMware load on top of an OS or is it stand alone? If an OS, does it need to be a Windows Server? I'm a Windows guy so don't suggest some Linux thing .... I've got an old Poweredge to setup as a test server. Time to get the ball rolling! Thanks in advance.
VMWare ESXi - Run it on bare metal. Create the virtual servers you need on it. Obviously you need to purchase a big enough hardware server to handle the virtual servers. Overpurchase on the hardware if anything. Because once you start having the ability to stand up a new server in minutes it becomes something your management will be needing. We did it on a project for half a dozen virtualized developer dev environments. Inside of 4 month we had well over 100 environments on multiple hardware servers handling dev/test/production. Also make sure you can clone the VM's for testing purposes. Upgrade? Suuuure. Clone current, test upgrade. If it fails, rollback and re-do it until you figure out the process.
VMware ESX is the top virtualization platform out there right now. Microsoft has one called Hyper-V but it's a much smaller presence in the real world. ESX is its own OS, you don't have to run it on top of a Windows server.
You also might consider getting a few servers depending on the number of VMs you are going to have. With that, you could Vmotion VMs from one server to another and have some redundancy
Looks like VMWare ESXi is free to download http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/overview.html but you register to get a product key? I was reading elsewhere about a 32 GB memory limit that the paid version didn't have? (not that I'll be worried about that in my scenario). Is the "free download" a fully functional version? Forgive me for the questions but you guys have already proven that you know what you're talking about.
If you are primarily a Windows guy go Hyper-V 2012 first. Lots of nice improvements in it that have closed the gap to ESXi. The only difficult part of the bare metal Hyper-V installation is learning to install any needed drivers via the command line tools. Setting up the Win8 machine to manage the Hyper-V server is pretty easy and shouldn't be difficult if you have a grasp on the Microsoft management tools. Then if it doesn't meet your needs take the time to learn the ins and outs of ESXi. The bare metal ESXi server is free and requires no product key. vSphere which is the more full featured management interface is what you'll be spending money on if you go that route and don't want to learn all the command line to manage it.
Frankly for the scenario you stated everything is Microsoft...including the OS. So just use the Hyper-V that is built into the box and you won't have to spend more money getting this setup working.
I believe it's a *nix based hypervisor but I'm not well versed in the details of the VMware hypervisor. It could be scratch built by VMware. We haven't deployed any in a bare metal scenario and have stuck to the product that runs under a Windows OS for our sometimes simple needs to run a Linux VM on older non-HyperV capable platforms.
I agree with this guy. I have a mix of ESX and Hyper-V at work. Both work, both have pros/cons. I run a Hyper-V at home with 5-7 guests nearly all the time, works great for 4 years. Even VirtualBox is useful but can't say I know enough to recommend for production. ESX is a Linux box FWIW.
I moved all of our servers to VMWare a few years ago. It's a great product and works perfectly for us. We run Exchange, SQL Server, web servers, file servers, and even a Linux server. The failover and load management works great. We have enough excess capacity that any 1 host could fail and the other 2 could take up the load. We have 3 IBM x3650 hosts connected to a pair of 16-drive fiber optic SANs. Currently running about a dozen VMs supporting about 200 users. If you do the project, I would recommend against doing a physical to virtual (P2V) conversion of the existing machines. Much better and cleaner to just create and configure new machines and transfer the data. Get the biggest drives you can for the SAN, and as much memory as you can. You can create new VMs in seconds, even copy existing machines. The only limitation is machine resources and OS licenses.
ESX / ESXi used to be linux-ish... ESX has been kicked to the curb, ESXi is a full in house kernel by VMWare that only retains the linux driver model to ease hardware support development.
There is no RAM limit on ESXi 5.1. You can install it without a license key, you have a 90 day evaluation period where it runs with all features enabled. Before that period is up, you will need to buy a license. The only reason for you to go Enterprise over Standard is if you actually need a VM with more than 8 procs. I doubt your SQL server in that tiny environment will need more than 8 procs, so Standard should be good to go. It is licensed by number of physical procs in the server. By socket, not core. If you have a single 6 core proc, one license. Two 6 core procs, two licenses, etc. The free version of vSphere does have the 32GB limit and is more or less a half-ass ESXi for small office use, home use, cheap "businesses" that shouldn't even have servers.
Hear what you're saying, still boots off a linux kernel then spawns their vmkernel, doesn't it? Like Mac OSX, it still looks and smells like a closed source linux to me. But regardless, it works. A windows person is probably going to have a considerably easier time getting up and running with the windows base already in place.
Thanks. A lot of good info here. As it turns out I just built a Windows 8 box for my self and I'll check out the Hyper-V on it. Additionally I'm going to try putting ESXi on the test Dell server that I have. Thanks again. This was the "leg up" that I was hoping for.
The base metal install will be the most complicated for a new user to VMware. They are however really good about providing good info on hardware that is tested for compatibility. When I started evaluating and learning the VM stuff I didn't have any issue with VMware on supported hardware. One up and running it's about the same in terms of management across the platforms.
