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Hardware for Home Lab - ESXi / Hyper-V

Answered Hardware for Home Lab - ESXi / Hyper-V

  • Tuesday, November 27, 2012 10:41 PM
     
     
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    Hello All,

    I'm lacking with hardware knowledge so I hope I can find some help here regarding the processor and motherboard.

    My current home lab (3 physical servers) for vSphere and Hyper-V is slowly dying. I'm looking into buying something more current, but as I've got very limited $$ resources I need a box that would allow me to run a nested environment in either of the options:

    - Windows 8 & VMware workstation, on top of that few VMs and 2 / 3 virtual hosts (HV2012/ESXi), on top of that a number of VMs to test Clustering/HA etc

    or

    - ESXi, on top of that VMs and virtual hosts (HV2012/ESXi), on top of that a number of VMs to test Clustering/HA

    If possible, I'd like to use Intel i7-870 processor that I have at home, but I'm not sure if it's going to be enough for the job? If yes, please advice on the motherboard. Otherwise, please advice on hardware configuration or oem boxes.

    Thank you!
    A.

     

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  • Wednesday, November 28, 2012 12:14 AM
     
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    For a single host it's really a matter of taste. I'd stick with ESXi as it's a bit more mature. H/V may have better recent hardware support. If you plan to run multi-node config then you may turn to Hyper-V as it offers free of charge something VMware is selling for money (HA and vMotion for example).

    StarWind iSCSI SAN & NAS

     
  • Wednesday, November 28, 2012 12:44 AM
     
     
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    You cannot nest VMs with Hyper-V.
     
  • Thursday, November 29, 2012 3:31 PM
     
     
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    Hi,

    I was hoping for some advice on hardware recommendation for the purpose of virtualization home lab.

    @Steve Jain, I plan to run Hyper-V 2012 nested on ESX5.X and it's feasible. 

     
  • Thursday, November 29, 2012 5:15 PM
     
     
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    Hi,

    I was hoping for some advice on hardware recommendation for the purpose of virtualization home lab.

    @Steve Jain, I plan to run Hyper-V 2012 nested on ESX5.X and it's feasible. 


    Not sure how you are saying that nesting Hyper-V under ESX is feasible.  It isn't supported for sure, because it doesn't work.  Both Hyper-V and ESX are bare metal hypervisors.  In other words, they need to be able to have complete access to the physical server.  If you install Hyper-V in a VM that is running on ESX, that VM does not have access to all the hardware.  You can do some simple things for demonstration purposes, but you cannot run a VM within Hyper-V in that setup.

    tim

     
  • Thursday, November 29, 2012 6:17 PM
     
     
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    Tim,

    I guess VMware community wouldn't agree.

    Please note:

    http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-8970
    http://communities.vmware.com/message/2115423?tstart=0

    + hundreds of step by step guides on Internet.

     
  • Thursday, November 29, 2012 7:26 PM
     
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    Yes, you can run Hyper-V (or ESXi) in an ESXi 5 VM, but you can't run Hyper-V inside of a Hyper-V vm.  Hyper-V does not allow any nesting of VMs.

    Your biggest issue will be disk contention and IO.  For nesting VMs, you will want fast hardware RAID 10 or an SSD.

    Always try to spread your VMs out over many spindles.

    A multi-core system with a lot of amount of RAM works, I think that your CPU should be ok. 

    They only caveat is to do a little research and make sure the motherboard plays well with virtualization.  For example, there are some Gigabyte boards that don't like ESXi and Hyper-V.

    Since you're going to run a ESXi host, you'll probably get more responses for motherboard recommendations from the ESXi community forum.

     
  • Wednesday, December 05, 2012 2:08 AM
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    Hi,

    I would like to confirm what is the current situation? Have you resolved the problem or do you have any further progress?

    If there is anything that we can do for you, please do not hesitate to let us know, and we will be happy to help.

    Lawrence

    TechNet Community Support