Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler WIndows Server Hardware Recommendations

Depending on how you setup your disk (ie multiple spindles or SSD) you could put a LOT of virtual machines all on the same physical box. The CPU itself doesn't matter too much although I'd recommend picking something with 4 cores (not HT). The machine would easily run at least 4 VMs. That way you could have 2 DCs to practice setting up a site plus another running WSUS. Most "desktop" motherboards these days can go up to 16G of ram. Since you're just using this as a learning tool you could prob get away with using 1-2G of ram per virtual server. I will emphasize all these recommendations are for a box that performance and reliability are not the most important requirements.

If you are truly "green" you might way to consider first just installing Server 2008 R2 Standard and enabling HyperV on it. That way you can get familar with the concepts of virtualization with the luxuries of doing it all on a windows machine (managing hdds for instance would be much easier). When you are ready to get into more advanced virtualization you could put ESX, XenServer or HyperV server on the physical machine.

I wouldn't wish HyperV on my worst enemy. XenServer unfriendly, and unpolished. It's true ESXi is powerful, but it's also pretty darn easy (as these things go) for a simple setup.

No way. FT requires a) multiple servers and b) vCenter. Which requires a full bore vSphere license (I think starting at Advanced?)

But INANE is right, the true bottleneck in virtualization is (and probably always will be) storage speed.

At work I'm running about 60 guests across 3 hosts (with RAM and CPU free, I could probably push things up to 90 guests, but really want to upgrade the hosts to dual Six Cores and 64 GB of RAM). Each host has dual Quad Core CPUs, with 32 GB of RAM. The storage is provided over iSCSI (two bonded 1Gb links) by a 24-drive array, organized into three arrays of 8 drives each under RAID6. Each individual drive is 1 TB, so with RAID6 that's 6 TB, or a total of 18 TB (which is way more than enough, because if you have a machine that's trying to eat up disk space as quickly as it can, it's not a good candidate for virtualization).

Once everything is up and running performance is very good. But a cold boot is painful (taking about an hour), even serializing the the loading process still causes so much disk contention that the arrays are saturated for a good while. (We have plenty of battery backup, and a generator, so cold boots are extremely rare).

In contrast, our setup at work will run... one virtual environment to start. Really its stupid. The application they are putting on this machine could run on any old desktop. It is not time critical, so as long as we have a backup machine and backup the db the app uses, we would be fine.

My boss' plan (as opposed to the corporate dudes) is to move our production DBs off our aging AS/400s to the new vm machine, the intent being to provide both harware and software redundancy. We have one other critical app that would also benefit from this sort of setup.

At home my demands are much simpler.

By cold boot, do you mean starting up the three hosts and all their vms? If so, surely staggering the boots a bit could help you cut that time down by reducing contention.

Yeah, from full power off.

I've only tried it a few different ways. But the delay until VMware Tools is loaded (still a little overlap as the machine that just loaded the tools settles down), seems to be the fastest. Fixed delays either have too much contention if set short, or a lull between loads if the delay is set too long. I have the important machines loading in order of importance. Then the workstations coming up in random order.

Really if you think about it, 60 minutes for 60 machines to boot is only 1 minute a machine (it's probably more like 3 minutes per machine with 3 loading at the same time). I don't expect it to be much faster, but still I dread shutting it down, because I know it'll be at least an hour before my phone finally stops ringing.

Yow. Yeah, I discovered the other day that cold booting my single server VMware View installation with ~20 desktop VMs and a single (at the time) local datastore produced... less than ideal results. I've never seen kernel latency so high. I'm hoping to get shared storage and at least a second, if not a third, server up there very soon. Just need to finish decommissioning my current vSphere setup.

Why are you guys running multiple desktops on one server?