Virtualization Help

[bbouzos]

Hey all,
I'm trying to get into virtualization a little bit, so I started looking at a few servers and narrowed my search down to these two:

Supermicro SC809 X7DWT-INF Single L5420 2.5Ghz. 8GB 1U Twin Server w/ SIMSO IPMI

Rackable NAS VMWare 16 Bay 2.5" SAS or SATA RAID Server JBOD Storage Array

Are they both capable of virtualization? Is the hardware RAID card on the Rackable NAS compatible with VMWare 5.0, or would it be better to stick with the Supermicro and purchase a RAID card that is VMWare 5.0 compatible separately?

Finally, am I going about this the right way?

Thanks

 

[root]

Do you intend to have more than one hypervisor?
(if not why bother with shared storage at all?)

 

[Captain Pooka]

I'm just now starting to virtualize my school. No money for VM ware, but this is what I'm doing (to start...). I am very experienced with virtualization. I just started here last year, though, and I am converting them.

You need two servers and a SAN. We're going to refer to the two servers as "Hosts" from now on because they're simply hosting the VMs. I've used VMware and I would prefer that over hyper-v, however hyper-v is capable of everything I need.

Depending on the amount of servers you have, and expandability you want, is how you decide the power you need each host to have. If you have 10 servers you want to virtualize, get two hosts. Put five servers on each, that way if one goes down (MB, because everything else is redundant IE two NICs, two PSUs, you have a SAN running raid 6 or 50 or whatever) the five servers will fail over to your other host. That way you experience minimal down time, like a minute or so. I would purchase two switches as well, just for extra redundancy.

Before looking what which server to buy, get an idea of what you want to do. I just bought 32GB RAM for one of my servers because a new VM is going to take 8GB. Once I expand I'll probably have four hosts, each with 32-64GB ram with 10GB switches (fiber is expensive!)

VMware is better in this aspect:

With Hyper-V you have your "Host" that has a server OS installed on it. WIthin that OS you install the Hyper-V role and add VMs to that. With ESX/ESXi you don't have the same requirements. You do still need a local HDD though (or two preferably) with both.

 

[jmacavali]

Great info, but old thread that the OP never came back to.