HomeLab thread? Whitebox, PowerEdge, ESXi, Hyper-V...

Frenzied Wombat

Frenzied Wombat

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Alkorin_sl said:
Yeah, except that it doesn't virtualize VT-x/d, so if you want to do a lab within a lab (such as, for example, virtualizing Hyper-V or ESXi), you can't. I'm running Hyper-V on my VM server over here and it's truly annoying that I can't play with ESXi inside of it (with 64-bit support, anyway).

ESXi is still the way to go. 32GB RAM cap for the free hypervisor, but honestly, that's a small price to pay if you aren't planning on running a universe of VMs. The only other annoyance is that VMware has destroyed support for fake-RAID in 5.5, where there used to be a trick or two to do it in 5.1 and lower. Get a real RAID card, if not only because it'll help your IO bottlenecks anyway.

Edit: Also, not sure where this 32GB RAM limit on non-Xeons is coming from, butnot true in my experience. Unless I'm missing something here.
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IMHO, for a home lab this is more than offset by features like dedupe and replica. Sure, in an enterprise environment you'll have a SAN doing the dedupe and snapshot shipping, but absent a SAN (SMB environments) these features of Hyper-V become pretty powerful. Native support for 4TB of memory on the host (and 1tb per guest) is another added bonus.. With 32 gb of ram being the max for the free ESX hypervisor, that's what-- four or five VM's? ESXi w/ Vcenter vs 2012R2 Hyper-V makes for a hotly contested white paper, but when it comes to comparing the free ESX vs Hyper-V, there just isn't any comparison.

EDIT: Confirmed that 2012 R2 support VT-d and SRV-IO.
 
Zodiac

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ESXi 5.5 (free or otherwise) has a 4TB memory limit, the 32 GB limit was for 5.1 and lower.
 
Frenzied Wombat

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Zodiac_sl said:
My mistake then about the RAM. I remembered that for awhile Intel's desktop LGA 1155, 1150, and 2011 chipsets were a max of 32GB - maybe something has changed?
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Good info and time for me to upgrade then, as we have one ESX 5.1 server with 32gb that hosts a few VM's that aren't technically supported in Hyper-V (mainly Cisco stuff). Other than that, we run two Hyper-V clusters on a NetAPP FAS2240 FC SAN-- probably 50 VM's in total (mix of 2k8,2k12, and Linux) and couldn't be happier. saving thousands a year in VMware licensing. While it would be doubtful that I'd ever risk my balls to do a production migration from VMware to Hyper-V over just licensing costs, if one is "starting fresh" or now just contemplating getting off bare metal, I'm finding it hard to justify VMware anymore with what Hyper-V is offering for free.
 
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Jilariz_sl

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The problem with Hyper-V for business use is that most vendors implement their product/advanced features first for Vmware. This will hopefully become less of a problem as time goes on, but right now there are a lot of great "new" vendors doing new things with new ways but their products don't have the same level of Hyper-V integration as they do for Vmware. Plus, System Center is ridiculously overcomplicated, as has been the case since it's original inception as SMS 1.0 back in the 90s. Another problem is if you ever have to use MS tech support. You are then talking to India's finest flowchart interpreters that ask every question in the oddest fashion, then make you identify what your specific problem is and you task them with addressing it. If you have multiple problems that may all stem from a single issue, they want you to open multiple support cases, which go to different support teams.

Regarding desktop systems' RAM limits: Most desktop class CPUs are stuck at 32GB (or even less depending on the model). There are only a handful of Intel i7 CPUs that can support 64GB of system RAM (Intel High End Desktop Processors).

One last random MS annoyance. A few months ago I attempted to download Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 from MS. Every time I tried to download it, the download would instantly fail. After trying IE/Chrome/Firefox, on different systems and OSs, I finally realized that the link was missing the ".iso" extension. When I added that to the link, wow, download worked.
 
Frenzied Wombat

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Jilariz_sl said:
The problem with Hyper-V for business use is that most vendors implement their product/advanced features first for Vmware. This will hopefully become less of a problem as time goes on, but right now there are a lot of great "new" vendors doing new things with new ways but their products don't have the same level of Hyper-V integration as they do for Vmware. Plus, System Center is ridiculously overcomplicated, as has been the case since it's original inception as SMS 1.0 back in the 90s. Another problem is if you ever have to use MS tech support. You are then talking to India's finest flowchart interpreters that ask every question in the oddest fashion, then make you identify what your specific problem is and you task them with addressing it. If you have multiple problems that may all stem from a single issue, they want you to open multiple support cases, which go to different support teams.

Regarding desktop systems' RAM limits: Most desktop class CPUs are stuck at 32GB (or even less depending on the model). There are only a handful of Intel i7 CPUs that can support 64GB of system RAM (Intel High End Desktop Processors).

One last random MS annoyance. A few months ago I attempted to download Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 from MS. Every time I tried to download it, the download would instantly fail. After trying IE/Chrome/Firefox, on different systems and OSs, I finally realized that the link was missing the ".iso" extension. When I added that to the link, wow, download worked.
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I agree with System Center, it's a fucking beast and I hate it, but I don't believe you need the full install as a pre-requisite for Virtual Machine Manager. I believe you can just install the SCVMM component, and even then you still access about 90% of the ongoing administrative functions via the hyper-V console. But yeah, fuck System Center ops/cfg manager. If you're good with it and can tame the beast, it works well, but it's one of those products that is more complicated than it needs to be. Like seriously fuck their SMS query builder language.

And I'm with you on MS India support. Shit is bad. We have a Premier agreement so we get competent people when we call, but I would be loathe to run all my servers in Hyper-V if I didn't have access to premier support. We haven't had to call them for any outage so far (shit's been solid), but I wouldn't run anything prod in VM if the underlying platform didn't have competent support.

So far though I haven't run into anything where lack of vendor support has made me regret going Hyper-V. We have an ESX server to run some Cisco UCS crap that isn't made available in vhdx format, but other than that I haven't noticed much. What have you run into?
 
Alkorin

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Jilariz_sl said:
Regarding desktop systems' RAM limits: Most desktop class CPUs are stuck at 32GB (or even less depending on the model). There are only a handful of Intel i7 CPUs that can support 64GB of system RAM (Intel High End Desktop Processors).
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Yep, that makes sense, then. I'm using a 3930K in my VM box and it's good with 64GB.

And don't get me started on System Center. We use it extensively at work and it tops my list of most hated solutions.
 
Alkorin

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Frenzied Wombat_sl said:
EDIT: Confirmed that 2012 R2 support VT-d and SRV-IO.
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^ This may actually change my mind in favour of Hyper-V. I need to be able to virtualize ESXi for some learn-work-stuff-at-home shit that I'm trying to get done.

Really, the only things that VMware has in its favour at this point is appliance support in the broad market, and (unless things have changed, and I'll admit I haven't really kept up) VM memory dedupe. I don't care about disk dedupe a-la-NetApp, disk is cheap.
 
Frenzied Wombat

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We need to start a thread titled "Tales of an Angry IT Admin". All I can say is after my last few weeks interaction with AT&T concerning some of our circuits, if I ever go postal AT&T's head office would be my first stop. Most fucking incompetent company I've ever had to interact with.
 
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Obtenor_sl

shitlord
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Holy shit, is so funny you guys talk about that; I had to install SCCM on some VMs for work and was having such a hard time installing it; we ended up opening up a support request with MS and a few minutes later this guy from India with the thickest accent called me to provide help. I mean, he was corteous and the whole process took almost 3 days, but everytime I hear some company outsourced something to India (and then charges you 200+ for support from them, while paying them nickles ans dimes) I think they're cheapskates.
 
J

Jilariz_sl

shitlord
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Frenzied Wombat_sl said:
I agree with System Center, it's a fucking beast and I hate it, but I don't believe you need the full install as a pre-requisite for Virtual Machine Manager. I believe you can just install the SCVMM component, and even then you still access about 90% of the ongoing administrative functions via the hyper-V console. But yeah, fuck System Center ops/cfg manager. If you're good with it and can tame the beast, it works well, but it's one of those products that is more complicated than it needs to be. Like seriously fuck their SMS query builder language.

And I'm with you on MS India support. Shit is bad. We have a Premier agreement so we get competent people when we call, but I would be loathe to run all my servers in Hyper-V if I didn't have access to premier support. We haven't had to call them for any outage so far (shit's been solid), but I wouldn't run anything prod in VM if the underlying platform didn't have competent support.

So far though I haven't run into anything where lack of vendor support has made me regret going Hyper-V. We have an ESX server to run some Cisco UCS crap that isn't made available in vhdx format, but other than that I haven't noticed much. What have you run into?
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SCVMM can be installed by itself.

Without going into a lot of annoying technical details, Nimble Storage, Veeam, and Hyper-V = Things can work great, but figuring out what works and what doesn't, had been an unnecessary challenge.
 
Frenzied Wombat

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Jilariz_sl said:
SCVMM can be installed by itself.

Without going into a lot of annoying technical details, Nimble Storage, Veeam, and Hyper-V = Things can work great, but figuring out what works and what doesn't, had been an unnecessary challenge.
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That's funny, I looked at the exact same combo when doing our Hyper-V eval. Ultimately I chickened out on the Nimble Storage (too new) and went for a NetAPP, at which point their snaprotect solution (basically OEM commvault stripped to work with Netapp only) was a better integrated backup solution over Veam because your snapshots could leverage the backup catalog, spool to tape, etc.. How are you liking the Nimble Storage? It looked great, I just chickened out because they were so new.
 
J

Jilariz_sl

shitlord
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Frenzied Wombat_sl said:
That's funny, I looked at the exact same combo when doing our Hyper-V eval. Ultimately I chickened out on the Nimble Storage (too new) and went for a NetAPP, at which point their snaprotect solution (basically OEM commvault stripped to work with Netapp only) was a better integrated backup solution over Veam because your snapshots could leverage the backup catalog, spool to tape, etc.. How are you liking the Nimble Storage? It looked great, I just chickened out because they were so new.
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One of the features of Veeam I'm hoping will come is support for the Nimble snapshots (they already have it for a couple of HP and EMC arrays), which sounds like the same thing as what your NetApp can do. As for the Nimble, I like it just fine. The performance is great for what little hardware is there and the actual array itself has been rock solid. Server side, their hardware VSS for Hyper-V, isn't up to snuff, and I was basically told I can't use that, yet. So that meant falling back to the MS VSS, which actually functions faster for Veeam backups, so it wasn't a horrible tradeoff. But looking forward, I'm keeping a close eye on Skyera. They will change the storage game unless/until a new storage tech comes out.
 
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