Changing my virtualization strategy

A few months back I talked about building a monster virtualization rig and installing VMWare Server 2.0 on Windows Server 2008 to host a handful of VMs. It's been running fine for a while, but kept seeing minor networking and lag issues here and there. In addition, I get VMs from clients at times to test configurations, do performance testing, etc... and most of these are VHD files, Microsoft virtual hard disks for use with VirtualPC 2007 or Hyper-V.

Most of my customers don't give me VMWare virtual machines (either created with VMWare Server, ESX or Workstation). I find more people are using Microsoft virtualization technology for development projects. Why? I can only guess it's a price point issue. VMWare Workstation (what I use on my laptop & love) costs $200 whereas the MSFT offering (Virutal PC) is free (granted, Workstation is more full-featured than VPC providing snapshots, worth the $200 on their own). For a server offering, while VMWare Server 2.0 is free, it can't be compared to Hyper-V or ESX because it will never be as fast without a hypervisor... that puts ESX against Hyper-V. Hyper-V is "free"... part of Windows Server 2008... whereas ESX isn't. Now, I know VMWare Server 2.0 is never going to compete with Microsoft's Hyper-V or VMWare ESX because the latter two contain hypervisors allowing the virtual machines to run closer to the metal.

The challenge was that if customers were giving me virtual machines to run, my current setup just wasn't cutting it. There really was no reason I was using VMWare Server 2.0 over Hyper-V on my virtualization rig. At first I wanted the option to move VMs between my laptop & server, but always seemed problematic. But that's also mitigated going to Hyper-V because I have a dual boot setup kicking with Vista & Windows Server 2008 on my laptop which has Hyper-V setup too. So, I still get that goodness of moving machines around.

At any rate, I finally elected to switch gears. Over the last two days I went through great pains to run my VMWare Server virtual machines off my laptop while I rebuilt my virtualization rig (which, BTW, I still love my dual XEON quad-core, 8 total cores of bliss, 1.5TB of fault tolerant RAID10 storage and 24GB RAM) with a clean install of Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V (this time, being smart and creating a small 75GB OS partition with the rest going to data).

So far I am more than pleased with Hyper-V! I was installing Windows Server 2008 & 2003, SQL Server 2008, ISA 2006, Visual Studio 2008, Office SharePoint Server 2007... man you name it... across a few machines and I could barely keep up. I'm VERY pleased with how fast Hyper-V is. The admin interface is intuitive and easy to use... not exposing the tons of configuration options available in VMWare Server (sure, some would like more options, but my guess is 95% of the folks will look past those).

I'm still working on getting the remote admin configured. Thanks to Loke Kit Kai & Ben Rob, I got the Hyper-V Manager for Vista x64, but I'm having connectivity issues (even though both my laptop & virtualization server are in the same domain and I'm an admin. Still gotta get that kink worked out... but for now, RDP will suffice.

Technorati Tags: windows server 2008,hyper-v,vmware server 2.0,vmware workstation,virtual pc

posted on Wednesday, October 01, 2008 5:48 PM

Feedback

# re: Changing my virtualization strategy 10/1/2008 10:13 PM Tom Resing

Andrew,
Thanks for posting this feedback on Windows Server 2008 and the Hypervisor. As a fellow SharePoint techie, I live in VM's all day as well and this is good information to have. I'm jealous of your hardware setup just dreaming of having something like that available locally to me.
Tom

# re: Changing my virtualization strategy 10/2/2008 8:03 AM Scott

ESX does in fact have a free version (ESXi) (www.vmware.com/go/getesxi/). This would certainly not be as efficient for those of doing SP development, as we are already in the Windows environment (so Hyper-V almost wins by default), but the option is there all the same.

# re: Changing my virtualization strategy 10/2/2008 5:46 PM Phillip Marcuson

Thanks for the update. I was wondering how that was going since I was looking to do something similar, but instead with MSFT hyper-v.

I, too, am kind of envious of your hardware set up. That memory price tag did raise the budget a bit :).

# re: Changing my virtualization strategy 10/3/2008 3:22 AM Adam

Hi,

ESXi is free and works very well om my Quad Core Q6600 with 8GB RAM and 2x500GB SATA in RAID0. I'm at the moment running 4 virtual machines simultaneously without any performance issues.

The nice thing about ESXi is that I just boot up the ESXi from my USB-stick (no large footprint here) and are up and running. I can at any time reboot to my Vista installation on a third drive.

# re: Changing my virtualization strategy 10/3/2008 7:43 PM Troy

I have almost the exact same rig that you have. The power supply is different and I went with the XEON 5430 chipset @ 2.66ghz. I am waiting on my hard drives. I am using (qty 5) the Samsung F1 1TB drives that have a 32mb buffer SAS/300 with a 7 year warranty. I had to add an Adaptec 5805 controller in order to run VMWare ESX. We will be running several SharePoint instances for development. I will let you know how it works out when I have everything configured.

# re: Changing my virtualization strategy 10/4/2008 7:47 AM AC [MVP MOSS]

Troy-
Let me know if the controller is recognized by ESX (more specifically, let me know if it sees the RAID array. For me, none of the solutions saw the RAID array, just 4 big disks. :(

# re: Changing my virtualization strategy 10/4/2008 10:48 AM Troy

I did quite a bit of reading on the issues of VMWare and RAID and they seem to fall into a couple of categories.
- Controller Support (and having the latest firmware)
- Drive Support. Need to research very carefully which drives can go on the controller. The Samsung drives seem to have very good success. If using Seagate or other be careful and make sure you have the latest firmware that supports ANO5
- Turn off all USB ports in the BIOS and other items that use up IRQs. I have read VMWare issues with Interrupt issues and since it is a server it is best to turn all these off. I turned off everything that I did not use: COM, USB, Motherboard controllers, even ethernet ports that I am not using, I can always turn them on later.

Eventually I would like to add a couple of 15k SAS drives to the setup to make it work even better. I read a couple posts online who have the same setup as mine with a couple SAS drives in it except they had a XEON 5460 3.16ghz chips.

# re: Changing my virtualization strategy 10/10/2008 5:00 PM Troy

The ASUS DSEB-DG is up and running with the Adapted 5805 controller. It has 4 SAS 15k 146gb drives in Raid 5 configuration and 2 SATA 3 - 750gb in RAID 1 configuration on it. ESXi recognizes all drives. It is very fast and have not run into any problems. Moving over 60 images onto it now. It will probably have between 8-12 images running on it at a time maybe more.

# re: Changing my virtualization strategy 11/7/2008 7:23 PM Marc

You install the OS on one partition and then SQL and MOSS (and the rest) on another partition? Did I understand that correctly? All the dev env creation guides put everything on C.

# re: Changing my virtualization strategy 11/8/2008 3:54 AM AC [MVP MOSS]

Marc-
That's not correct. I installed everything on one partition. The mention of two partitions is the host machine, not the guest machines.

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