So I\u2019m in the mood to upgrade my virtual server. Right now it\u2019s running some Phenom II Quadcore with 8GB of RAM. There are 2 320GB disks in a Raid 1 using the onboard nvdia controller.<\/p>\n
The disk configuration was a big deciding factor when I was trying to choose between Hyper-V R2 or ESXi 4.x. Simply put, ESXi doesn\u2019t recognize the controller as anything more than a standard SATA controller, so RAID and thus ESXi were a no-go.<\/p>\n
Microsoft\u2019s built in management tools for Hyper-V never appealed to me. I don\u2019t feel like I can do enough to the host OS. Plus, getting them to work in the first place is an ordeal itself. See http:\/\/blogs.technet.com\/b\/jhoward\/archive\/2008\/03\/28\/part-1-hyper-v-remote-management-you-do-not-have-the-requested-permission-to-complete-this-task-contact-the-administrator-of-the-authorization-policy-for-the-computer-computername.aspx<\/a>. Now that everything is up and running, I don\u2019t want to touch it lest I break anything. I hate this kind of feeling with systems and replace them with something more manageable ASAP.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not sure how well Systems Center works for managing multiple Hyper-Vs in an enterprise, but vCenter works very well and it\u2019s quite robust. I feel like it is a very complete management solution for a virtual machine environment. I digress though, this is just for home and only 1 machine.<\/p>\n Another thing that I don\u2019t like is the lack of memory overcommit. Hyper-V won\u2019t let me provision more than 7 of the 8GB for the guest systems. As I experiment and put in new systems, this is becoming a real hard limit and I\u2019m pretty much stuck right now.<\/p>\n So, I\u2019ve made the decision to do what it takes to get onto ESXi. First thing I need to do is replace the RAID controller. I picked up a Dell Perc 6i WITH battery (score!) off of eBay for cheap. Almost all of the controllers do NOT come with brackets, so I had to purchase one<\/a> from Mouser electronics. My plan is go at least 2 1TB drives for OS and at least 2 2TB drives for a file server all a minimum of RAID1. I might do something else if I can pick up more drives, but no 0. To get this going, I need a 32-pin to 4 SATA cable. One can be had from Dell<\/a> or Amazon<\/a> for about $20.<\/p>\n Once this is in, I\u2019m going to have to P2V all the servers from Hyper-V hell using VMware Workstation on my desktop as purgatory before I bring up the ESXi host and then import them into VMware heaven.<\/p>\n I\u2019m then going to up the memory on a couple of systems to see what performance is like when I overcommit. If it\u2019s acceptable, then I\u2019ll be happy for about 5 minutes. At some point, I\u2019m going to pull all that RAM and add 4 4GB sticks to max out the system at 16GB of RAM anyway.<\/p>\n Right now I\u2019m just waiting on the cables from Amazon and then I have to order hard drives from Newegg. One other thing I\u2019m worried about is heat. The case I have does not have any cooling over the hard drives and I noticed the ones in place now are pretty hot. That may be another cost that I\u2019m eventually going to have to consider, but I\u2019ll cross that bridge when I get to it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So I\u2019m in the mood to upgrade my virtual server. Right now it\u2019s running some Phenom II Quadcore with 8GB of RAM. There are 2 320GB disks in a Raid 1 using the onboard nvdia controller. The disk configuration was a big deciding factor when I was trying to choose between Hyper-V R2 or ESXi […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-microsoft","category-vmware"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1tGEc-E","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guammie.com\/donovan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guammie.com\/donovan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guammie.com\/donovan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guammie.com\/donovan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guammie.com\/donovan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.guammie.com\/donovan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guammie.com\/donovan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guammie.com\/donovan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guammie.com\/donovan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}