Virtualized servers

[roussell]

I saw in a post from Dan that ESXi (4.0 I'm assuming) supports PCI and USB passthrough. Is this only with certain motherboards? I tried ESXi and could never get USB passthough to work. My other problem was that there was no management utility for the Mac platform. To administer the box I'd have to load another virtual XP session on my Macbook just to run the vSphere client.

I ended up creating my own psuedo-baremetal hypervisor of sorts. I created a very minimal install of Debian Linux with a Blackbox window manager and Sun's VirtualBox. I load each VM in a different desktop on startup and the host OS does nothing but manage the VMs, the drives (using LVM) and act as a VNC host. From my Macbooks or anything else I can administer the host box and any of the virtuals through a VNC session.

The box is an HP that has a quad-core Intel 8200, 6 SATA ports, and 8GB of RAM. Currently I have 3 terabytes of storage split between 5 virtual machines. Even though the 8200 doesn't have VT built in - I see no performance hits when running 32 bit guests (obviously 64bit guests aren't possible without VT, but that doesn't affect me.)

1 Homeserver Linux VM that acts as network storage for media and a Time Machine backup for the Apples.
1 HouseBot XP machine that is the primary HA machine. I use usb-serial adapters and a Quatech box.
1 Linux server that compliments the Housebot server by running OWFS, LaCrosse weather station apps, and other misc. things that feed HouseBot
1 HA playground XP VM - currently has Homeseer eval, Premise, and J9AE on it. This is where I test out other stuff. It gets re-created every so-often.
1 XP development VM. This has Visual Studio, another copy of HouseBot (for dev) and other tools needed for HA development on it. Things are created and tested here before they make it to the 'production' box.

VirtualBox is nice because it seems to use very little overhead, there are also several tools available for managing you VMs and drives. There is now the ability to take a snapshot and turn it into a new, separate VM. I keep a Linux and XP default install ready for when I need a new 'box'.

So, what is everyone else doing with their virtual installs?


Terry

 

[electron]

I am using ESXi 4.0 on a Dell T110 with an X3430 Xeon CPU and 4 GB of memory. I also have an older AMD AMD 64 3200 with 1 GB of memory running MS Virtual Server, but the virtual machines will be moved to ESXi soon. The ESXi machine currently runs 2 XP machines, 1 Windows 2003 Server and 2 Ubuntu machines. I am almost done converting everything to a virtual machine, which is creating a big drop in my energy/UPS requirements, plus the machines are faster than ever (the previous host machines were old AMD machines, power hungry and not that fast). I opted to go with just the 160GB HD in the ESXi machine, since my NAS supports iSCSI (still playing around with that, but results look promising), and all my machines do weekly backups/images to the NAS.

For desktop virtualization, I use Virtual PC and Virtual Box. I prefer the features and speed of VB, but the virtual hard drives aren't as portable as the MS Virtual PC ones, so I use both.

As for the pass-through feature, only newer chipsets support it, this site has some more info about it (scroll down to the VMDirectPath section). I was pretty impressed with Xen, it ran well, but the VMDirectPath feature was what made me lean towards ESXi.

 

[signal15]

I use VirtualBox for everything. You can run it headless, and the new 3.1.x train support live migration and has some better snapshot capabilities. I like ESXi, but I don't like the fact that the management utility is windows only. With VirtualBox, you can bind a port for RDP to the console of each virtual server.

 

[BioSehnsucht]

Xen (Linux based) can virtualize (with modern VT capable CPUs) both Linux and Windows VMs, and can pass through certain types of hardware (at least I know people have gotten ZoneMinder to work with capture cards in Linux VMs). I don't know about USB though, I haven't got around to playing with it. Windows consoles are connected to with VNC so not exactly the highest performing GUI access but presumably these would be headless in operation normally anyways.

I haven't got first hand experience with anything but old style VMWare Workstation / Player, and as an end-user of ESXi VMs (they have their storage on iSCSI devices or something, and we RDP or SSH to the guest OS depending on type, or use the VMWare Infrastructure Client to get direct console access). We don't have any real hardware connected to these VMs, so I haven't any experience there either.

I have been looking at building a Xen system at home to play with, since it ought to be less cantankerous about supported hardware than ESXi is (or from what I've heard from others...). Also, free. But this won't happen anytime soon, probably... I don't want to spend money on new hardware just now and my only VT capable hardware is my desktop box ...

 

[drozwood90]

Anyone used Hyper-V?

 

[electron]

I looked at Hyper-V, and while it does look promising, the free bare metal version is a command line only setup from what I can tell (but still runs on Win2k8). I think right now, the leaders are Xen and ESXi. ESXi is Linux based as well, and seems to run really well. Bio is correct that Xen will run on more hardware (I actually ran it for a few weeks because ESXi didn't support my SATA controller until the latest update they pushed out recently).

I was not aware Xen supported hardware passthrough, guess I will have to research that one.

 

[roussell]

I wasn't aware that Xen worked with Windows guests. I thought Xen support had to baked into the virtualized OS kernel? Is this not the case or did MS add the support (seems unlikely)?

Terry

 

[electron]

I think there is some confusion here, Xen is definitely Linux based.

 

[roussell]

I think there is some confusion here, Xen is definitely Linux based.

Edited my post - I was referring to Windows GUESTS. I thought that any guest in a Xen setup required kernel support of Xen in the guest OS. Is that not the case?

Terry

 

[drozwood90]

So, is hyper-v an addon for Server 2008? It looks like the Enterprise edition has Hyper-V's features built in...

--Dan

 

[signal15]

I wasn't aware that Xen worked with Windows guests. I thought Xen support had to baked into the virtualized OS kernel? Is this not the case or did MS add the support (seems unlikely)?

Terry

Check out OpenVZ. Zen for linux guests, but also uses something else for other guest OS's. Pretty web admin interface, and easy clustering support. And it's free.

 

[BioSehnsucht]

Xen does Windows guests but ONLY with Intel VT or AMD-V (their respective hardware virtualisation features) CPUs. This feature was introduced with Xen 3.0:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xen#MS_Window...stems_as_guests

The wiki article implies that the disk and network IO is less than optimal, but paravirtualisation drivers to improve performance are being worked on, don't know if they're considered stable ?

Like I said haven't had a chance to play with it yet (or even really dig into how things work)

 

[drozwood90]

So, ESXi 3.5 does not support USB passthrough?

--Dan

 

[electron]

VMDirectPath isn't supported by ESXi 3.5, but I can't say for sure if there are hacks to make certain USB devices work under 3.5. I think the recommended method in 3.5 is to use a USB-over-IP adapter.

 

[drozwood90]

Dan,

Thanks for the info. Now I know not to bother with ESXi until I get some 64 bit hardware (4.0 appears to be x64 only).

Looks like you nailed things though...quad core...nice system, running something like ESXi...great idea! Then, if things get buggered, just move the vm image to another machine and go...

How is it for making system backup images? Can you just make a "real-time" copy of the image file?

Right now I do something like Acronis...but have been working towards a better i.e. more automated backup...but I like being able to just image the whole thing back on when things go awry.

--Dan