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

Would the vswitch interfaces being tagged effect line speeds?

Big Phoenix said:

Reason why I mentioned hyper-v is that is what we use at work. Weve had some VMs go down a few months ago and the sysadmin who usually handles them just hasnt gotten around to bringing up new ones. Ive played around in hyper-v manager in server 2012 a little and it seems fairly straight forward but would like to tinker around at home before I would do anything at work.

But Ill definitely look into the NUCs. Didnt think much about them since I assumed just being dual cores they wouldnt be well suited for it.

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I trust this guys opinion quite a bit. Here is a sample of one of his labs.
VSAN 6.2 (vSphere 6.0 Update 2) homelab on 6th Gen Intel NUC

He does call out that the NUC is not on the HCL but this really isn't a shock

I just setup my R710 as an ESXi server instead of 2012 R2 running Hyper-V.

Hyper-V worked great, but I think the extra Linux support in ESXi will be more useful for me right now. My 2nd datastore that is 3GB is running as a RAID10, so it's nice and quick.

What do you guys think about this for $160 and $60 shipping?

Dell Poweredge R710 2 X QUAD CORE 2.66GHZ E5640 72GB MEMORY 2 X 146GB 10K SERVER

Not worth it?

Yea the first thing I'd do is expand the HDD. Just wondering if it worth this initial investment.

Friday said:

What do you guys think about this for $160 and $60 shipping?

Dell Poweredge R710 2 X QUAD CORE 2.66GHZ E5640 72GB MEMORY 2 X 146GB 10K SERVER

Not worth it?

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What are you attempting to do with your lab. Running servers at your home can be expensive as fuck so low-power options like NUC payoff in the long term.

Anyone familiar with the Microsoft RemoteApp and VDI environment? Using that + standard Hyper-V servers etc. have a few questions about migrating hosts of the VDI's VMs

Vinen said:

What are you attempting to do with your lab. Running servers at your home can be expensive as fuck so low-power options like NUC payoff in the long term.

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You have a NUC you'd recommend to run a Minecraft server, Plex, and training environment for hypervisors?

Aaron said:

Are there any good tutorials or websites for people who know nothing about virtual machines? I am especially thinking about answers to security issues if you happen to get computer AIDS in a virtual machine, can it fuck up the "real" machine?

I'm doing this for ... science.. yeah, science...

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VMescape.com - VM Escape is NOT your primary security concern

Xadion said:

Anyone familiar with the Microsoft RemoteApp and VDI environment? Using that + standard Hyper-V servers etc. have a few questions about migrating hosts of the VDI's VMs

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We use RemoteApp, but you couldn't pay me to inflict VDI upon my user base.

We are going through a budget "concern" aka "crisis" - so my uppers are pushing to promote thin clients as a cost savings method.

I got demo units from Dell, HP and AXLE and got them all set up on our MS RemoteApp/Desktop system and they all work well and whatnot.

My main question is it seems if I want to do a true update to my VDI template and then distribute it, I just poof my pool of VDI's and replace them with my new VDI image... seems a little clunky- but with shared user profiles (VDI's roaming profile per say) nothing should be lost in this process - just seems kind off...not a very "good" way of doing it and I know I must be missing the "proper" way of doing it.

RemoteAPP is great and easy and effective - the only thing we would leverage VDI for is large labs- and that's awhile down the road... if we move our staff computers to thin clients it would be Win10IOT + Remote Apps, not VDI's

Xadion said:

We are going through a budget "concern" aka "crisis" - so my uppers are pushing to promote thin clients as a cost savings method.

I got demo units from Dell, HP and AXLE and got them all set up on our MS RemoteApp/Desktop system and they all work well and whatnot.

My main question is it seems if I want to do a true update to my VDI template and then distribute it, I just poof my pool of VDI's and replace them with my new VDI image... seems a little clunky- but with shared user profiles (VDI's roaming profile per say) nothing should be lost in this process - just seems kind off...not a very "good" way of doing it and I know I must be missing the "proper" way of doing it.

RemoteAPP is great and easy and effective - the only thing we would leverage VDI for is large labs- and that's awhile down the road... if we move our staff computers to thin clients it would be Win10IOT + Remote Apps, not VDI's

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I have never seen VDI turn out to be cheaper than desktops. Never; it's a total fucking sales pitch. In fact, the cheapest per client cost I've ever seen for VDI is about 1k, and that doesn't include all the immeasurable soft costs like the staffing knowledge needed to run the environment properly, and extra troubleshooting time for everything from your hosts down to the desktop helpdesk guy whose skills you've effectively neutered since the "desktop" is really running on a server connected to a SAN.

IMHO cost is the worst reason to justify a VDI environment; the real value comes in environments like hospitals and schools where you want an easily recyclable environment where performance doesn't matter. Outside of these two use cases, VDI is dogshit. It costs more, it's difficult to troubleshoot, when something goes wrong all your clients are impacted, and it forces your infrastructure team to get roped into client performance issues.

I work at a state college - I would not want out staff / faculty computers to be VDI ever - never ever.

What seems to be our first proof of concept is to take these kiosk's all our students sign in at for student services, such as advisement, fin aid guidance etc. and replace them with a thin client streamed the kiosk app via remote app. This POC can be done on our current hardware - yet my VP et al know that if we where to do anything more it would involve buying more hardware for the back end - and eventually they would need to hire another "me" to work with me to support this infrastructure.

Me and my other teammates have already told them that hard costs are basically a wash- but as I said we are in a odd financial time - there is some law or whatever that states only X% of $ can be spent on staff/faculty we are 1-2% over - so we have to make a plan to show how we are getting that back into the proper % - so if we say that we are going to not replace 3 lower level tech support jobs once they quit/retire/promoted and hire 1 higher level tech - that's a savings of 2 benefits $ and + 20-30k for the salary difference - even if the hardware costs behind that are more $ - because its not staffing $.

So its a do more with less people kind of thing - this is going to happen across the entire org - people that have been here 30+ years and are making 30-40% more than base will be given a nice reason to retire, so on and so on - they never fire anyone (we didn't do any layoffs during the 09-ish crisis) its just plans on how we are to shift the % down to make it inline with what we should do.

This RemoteAPP and VDI stuff is just what I am involved in Where I would like to see thin clients with a full desktop steamed to them would be in our student labs, beyond that and a few nice cases for remote app - no, replacing the user desktops with it is just adding pain.