Virtualization (VMware, VirtualBox, Hyper-V, ...)

Since virtualization generally has its own unique set of problems (and solutions), and I'm always messing with VMs, I figured I'd start this one.

I'm currently running a lab infrastructure at home using Hyper-V R2, and a bunch of miscellaneous VMs on some of my workstations using VMware Workstation 9/Player 5. One of these is Mac OS X 10.8.2. I can't, for the life of me, get the VMware Tools to work properly (no copy/paste outside the VM, video acceleration is sketchy). I know it's not entirely likely, but anyone done this?

Or, if anyone has virtualization nightmares to share, let's hear them.

OUAriakas_sl said:

Have you tried the VMWare knowledge base or users forums? It seems to me that VMWare's KB is most comprehensive one around.

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The issue here is that running OS X in a VM (that isn't VMware Fusion or Parallels, on an actual Mac) isn't supported by Apple, so no one officially cares about it.

I tried looking around and discussion is fairly readily available, but solutions, not so much. It's a kext issue, I'm sure. I just don't have an in-depth understanding of OS X internals, so I don't know what to avoid doing that might blow up OS X when I upgrade the tools (which happened yesterday; I was a dumbass, and didn't take a snapshot, so had to revert to a backup).

As to a start with virtualization, I'd say, find yourself a good virtualization blog and jump in using whatever spare resources you may have lying around. Most hardware won't run commercial offerings like VMware ESXi -- it has a very specific HCL -- but pretty much anything will run Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware Player (or Workstation if you feel like spending a bit) or VMware Server (old, but still a good place to start), VirtualBox (free for non-commercial use), Xen (if you're ready for some Linux-style hacking), etc.

A quick search led me here:http://www.van-lieshout.com/2009/08/...re-do-i-start/

There are dozens like it, and they aren't all VMware-related, but VMware is the king of the market right now. There are some basics covered here, and some instructions on how to set up a quick ESXi installation on portable media (so that you're not doing anything permanent to your server/workstation). Since ESXi has a free trial mode, one of many good places to start is just to throw the software on a USB stick and see what it's like to work with the real thing.

Some quick links for folks who've never seen this stuff:

Hyper-V comes as a role with Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2 and 2012, and Windows 8. You can also download Hyper-V 2008 R2here.
VirtualBox:https://www.virtualbox.org/(downloadhere)
VMware:www.vmware.com(and some quick download links toServer,Player,Workstation (free eval),ESXi / vSphere 5 (free eval))
Xen:http://www.xen.org/(downloadhere)

You have to register to download most things from VMware. Not sure about the others.

For reference's sake, I run VMware Workstation and Player on my desktops, and Hyper-V 2008 R2 on my server. My server isn't an enterprise product, so it doesn't have a network card compatible with VMware ESXi, and I don't have any iSCSI storage or an HCL compatible hardware RAID card either, so I can't consolidate storage in ESXi. These were the decision points for me. Ultimately, ESXi is leaps and bounds ahead of Hyper-V in a lot of ways, but it's also extremely picky when it comes to hardware compatibility.

Yep, done this before -- it will do pretty much anything except virtualize fault tolerance, which is aggravating.

I've heard that you can virtualize FT within ESXi (e.g. 2+ virtual instances of ESXi within ESXi with shared storage), though, provided it's running on bare metal. Haven't tried it yet. I have a lack of spare hardware that can run ESXi.

Probably going to migrate to Hyper-V 2012 at home shortly (like, sometime this week). Gotta get a full backup of everything done first so I don't lose my shit if (for some reason -- this is Microsoft, after all) it fails to run my Hyper-V R2 VMs.

We run ESX / ESXi at work. I'm not very involved in the host level stuff, due to crazy politics.

I work in government... everyone silos everything. Although I think you may be partially right. =)

Our environment is fairly small. Only about 100 VMs. We're about to put another 1500 or so up, though, on new hardware... mostly virtual workstations.

I really, really wish that VMware Workstation would run alongside Hyper-V so that I could do the same, or that ESXi would run inside Hyper-V (which it won't, as far as I know).

It's probably a bit too late to figure out a way to install ESXi bare metal on my server, given that it holds about 9TB of video and such on a software RAID, which ESXi can't do without a whole lot of pain (like, for example, providing 4 raw HDs to a single VM, RAIDing them up and re-exporting the whole thing as iSCSI. Ugh).

I might just have to dedicate a laptop to running a virtual ESXi environment. What a waste.

Vinen_sl said:

I seem to remember going to a discussion at VMWorld 2012 discussing using Virtualized ESXi hosts.
Anyone heard of any limitations?

I can ask around internally at VMWare a little bit...

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The only limitation I've seen is the one I posted above (virtualizing fault tolerance), and that's due to the difficulty of virtualizing CPU replay. If I recall correctly, you can bypass this in an ESXi host running on bare metal, but not in Workstation/Player/Server as the software won't let you virtualize that feature.