Hi,

I'm looking for some advice on virtualization. So far, I have had both KVM and ESXi suggested to me, but I'm not sufficiently experienced in the technology to be able to make a rational choice, and there may be other, "better" solutions....

I have a small (but growing) home network. I have a few old(ish) computers lying around which the kids complain are too slow and which, quite frankly, aren't worth upgrading. I have recently managed to aquire an HP Prolient DL380G5 with 16Gb of RAM and 8x 146Gb HDDs. I believe it's a quad-core xeon.

My plan is to install some virtualization software on it and then run one machine for each family member. I then thought I'd convert the crappy PCs into rDesktop clients for the machines. I also have some personal projects which would benefit rom having access to a virtual network of machines. The idea is to have 3 or possibly 4 virtual machines that are perminantly on. I may have a further 4 or 5 that I start as required (porbably not more than 2 at a time, though). The ability to snapshot the machine states would be beneficial as would the ability to clone machines, although the latter is not essential.

My understanding is that ESXi is much "cleaner" as it has virtually no host OS, but that it lacks flexibility for things like cloning unless you pay for VMWare's console. KVM is open source, but requires knowledge that I don't think I have in order to get it working. It is also likely to be slower due to the overhead of a host OS.

Is that a fair comparison? What solution would others go for? Am I completely mad thinking of doing this at all?

Comments welcome

Hi,

ESXi and VSphere Client is available at no cost. You have to license VCenter Server, but this is not required for your single server home setup.

Citrix Xenserver as i know is opensource, XenCenter is free of cost at Citrix website, so this will also an option.

Both work well from my experience, ESXi provides more functionality as i can see, Xenserver has a more intuitiv GUI.

Hi,

I am in exactly the same situation as you. I want one powerful computer that serves up VMs to multiple client machines around the house.

I have previous experience with VirtualBox, and have managed to set this up on an existing headless Debian box. See VBoxHeadless if you are not familiar with VirtualBox.

Each client machine can access via RDP or you can just use SSH and X. I have set up one machine with a minimal Ubuntu install that opens a VDI Ubuntu from the server and, even with my severely underpowered host, it is almost workable.

Other client OS's worth a look:
http://www.2x.com/thinclientserver/
http://www.thinstation.org/

My experience (with VirtualBox) is that you will have no trouble with the spec you have posted there.

I started looking into the type of hardware that would be required when a colleague suggested I should use a "type 1/bare metal" OS instead.

My question would be: is there a "noticeable" difference in the performance of Type 1 virtualisation against Type 2?

If you do look into Type 2 and VirtualBox, from what I have experienced, it does seem to integrate well with the client machines (USB support, sound, clipboard etc) - with GuestAdditions installed, and seems easier to set up for the novice, however I have no experience in other virtual platforms.

I would love to hear some other views on the best virtualisation setup for a home network as most of the information I can find is geared towards large enterprise situations.

Hi,

from my experience bare metal hypervisors provides not only better performance and as an absolut plus the direct access to hardware virtualization capabilities of your hardware (VT-x/VT-D etc).

Host operating system based hypervisors (VMServer, VirtualBox etc) requires an layer between the VM and the OS and the OS is an additional layer to the hardware.

Also more advanced features like cloning, templates, backup API, scripting possibilites are very useful.

The main difference is the cost of hardware, VMWare workstation/VirtualBox etc can run directly on your PC without any specific requirement.

ESXi for example does not support any available hardware on the market, especially not every NIC and CPU.

For my home setup i use a Intel Core Duo2, 8GB RAM and an external FreeNAS based storage in conjunction with 2 Intel NIC's and a HP switch to get in use of bonding/port truncing. This works well for 6 VM's running for my family and testing purposes.

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Howdy!

So the important thing to note, before going down this road, is what precisely your machines are going to be doing.

Based on how you describe your setup, I'm going to have to assume you have kids who will undoubtedly want to play games, chat with friends, etc.

At this point, ANY virtualization scheme is not going to be acceptable for these purposes. If your driving motivation (and I'm not saying it is) for virtualization is to consolidate the running computers in your house, you will be S.O.L. and will end up breaking down and buying junior a computer/laptop anyway.

However — that being said ← there are some clear decisions that need to be made. Assuming that the lag associated with remote desktop is not an issue, you will want something that still has reasonable hardware support through to your guest machines (read: VMs). VirtualBox does an ok job of this, but it does require a full fledged OS to support it underneath. For 2 or 3 machines for the youngsters and a couple test boxes for you, it's ok. Not great, and the resource allocation needs some work. If you're running 1 or 2 VMs, it's excellent.

VMWare, dominates. Period. ESX is by FAR the best virtualization option for running many machines simultaneously. Note that I said ESX. If you were going to go for VMPlayer (Fail.) or VMWare Workstation, you may as well run VirtualBox, because it outperforms the aforementioned offerings.

ESX will give you the scalability you may desire, as well as excellent resource management. If your kids are just using the computer to type up reports, maybe the occasional MSN/AIM/Skype/Whatever chat session, then this will be fine. You can still get full USB support to your guest environments, as well as the ability to set up virtual networks. This is clutch.

Particularly since it appears that you wish to do some lab work for yourself. At work my ESX machine is a quad-core with 16gbs RAM and 2TB HDD space. I have 16 VMs with 8 virtual networks where I can mix and match environments to test out different configurations. It's easy and intuitive.

As for Citrix, it's overly complicated and incredibly bloated. The resource management is fair, but both the offerings are overly complicated and drag performance down. Further, the direct hardware support is spotty.

The best performance by far is Novell's ZEN virtualization environment. The downsides, as with all things Novell, is that it's garrish and ridiculously complicated to set up. No real GUI (although there are a couple freeware projects which are working to correct this), no virtual networks as far as I can tell, but the performance is incredible. Ironically, I was able to compile java from source twice as fast on my Novell ZEN Guest machine (Guest OS: Ubuntu 10-04, standard install with no patches) than on my ESX machine.

Due to my testing requirements, however, I'm willing to overlook the performance for ease of use.

Hope this helps, let me know if you have any questions.

_O_

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Thanks for the replies and information.

I don't want to take over the thread, but hopefully there's some relevant info for the OP.

For my situation, I'm only really looking to make use of a netbook and some low spec. computers etc and you both indicate it should work reasonably well.

The idea of not having the OS fixed to a single machine, and being able to backup or install a new OS without any alteration to the machine is something that also appeals to me.

Thanks again.

Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to read my question and especially to those of you who have put the effort into responding.

I read what everyone had to say and decided, on balance, to go with ESXi 4.1. I've downloaded it, installed it to a USB flash drive (which my server has an internal socket for) and got it working. XP is happily running on my first VM!

Before I go much further, however, I have a concern. According to mesiol, Well, I downloaded VSphere Client via the link obtained from my new server's web interface. I registered it and have been told that it is a 60-day trial? I don't want to get everything set up and then find that I can no longer manage it because my console trial has expired....

Responding to 0rwell, I think the system will perform ok for my needs. The two kids concerned ar 6 and 16. The 6 year-old is only just starting with computers. The games he will be playing are low-power reuirements and a lot of the reason for virtualizing his machine is to keep the config "safe"/ The 16-year old's problems revolve around lack of memory and loading too much rubbish. He has about a dozen VPNs loaded (he denys this!) and about 30 windows open! Most of the time it's just web browsing, programming and web-chatting. He's not a gamer, but uses Dreamweaver et al (and tests his creations in several different browsers) so I don't think he will have too many problems - it'll be faster than he has anyway! I have a Gb LAN so don't anticipate problems with network lag.

Anyway, thanks again everyone. Any further comment / advice appreciated.

Hi,
the license shown is NOT the license of the client, it's the trial license of the ESXi.

Get a permanent license at vmware site by login into your account and check for ESXi license.

Go through the following steps in order to enter the serial number in your ESX4i host

Home -> Inventory -> top level (your ESXi Host)
Configuration Tab
Left-hand side - Licensed features
Edit -> Assign new key to this host -> Enter Key
Paste your key
Confirm all the rest
Your ESXi Server is now fully licensed

Please note - you will only have the basic functionality and all the enterprise features that came with the Evaluation License are no longer valid

You have to register with vmware and request a free licsense then enter that license key to get past the 60 day trial. But the downside is the free license looses a lot of features like templates and cloning and such.
Remember too Licensing for MS windows if your going to use it, if those old desktops have an OEM license sitcket its not transferrable off of that hardware legally.

Some things about ESXi that are relevant to your choice:

• ESXi has 300-1000mb footprint with 0 guests running
• ESXi requires a Windows GUI client for full control
• ESXi is avialable 'free' for ??? ammount of time; free-ness can disappear tomorrow
• ESXi is newbie friendly

Some facts about KVM:

• KVM requires hardware virt extensions
• KVM has a 60mb footprint when properly configured
• KVM wins 5:3 in RedHat's performance benchmarks against ESX
• KVM is licensed under the GPL(free forever)
• KVM has clients usable on every operator system
• KVM is much less less newbie friendly than ESXi client-wise(no virt-manager for Windows)

Seems to be alot of VMWare astro turfing here for a Linux-centric forum.

Qualifications for making those points:
I admin 9 ESX hosts with vSphere4 for a living, along with a fair share of Xen and KVM hosts. For performance, my Xen and KVM hosts beat VMWare in every benchmark. When it comes to trying to "bring a new guy up to speed", VMWare wins... it's nearly as easy as VirtualBox to pick up and start using.

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Hi module0000,

The required hardware is the thing that stops me looking further into KVM.

My required setup is simply to have access to 1x Debian (used as a general server), 1x Ubuntu and 1x WinXP (desktops) plus a couple of testing VMs. If possible, a Win7 VM would be nice.

No more than ~3 VMs running at one time. Raid and encryption required.

There really would not be a lot going on within those machines – I would like to see how GIMP/Inkscape ran, but the fallback plan would be to have another main computer not tied to the VM host for this type of thing.

What sort of CPU and RAM would I need for the above setup? Can you link to any Intel VT/AMD-V CPUs within that spec?

I would probably be looking to spend under ~£1k without the hard drives – does that sound realistic?

That is very do-able if you use a linux-based host. You could encrypt the root volume group, ergo all your guest's disk images will be encrypted. Most linux installs make this easy and allow you to setup encrypted LVM at install-time.

Those won't be a problem, the only time you will notice significant performance knocks are if you attempt to use 3d acceleration.

4GB of RAM would support that environment fine, but 6-8GB would give you growing and "playing" room for the future.

For CPU, you should prefer a quad-core, although you could get by(with noticeable slowdowns when 3+ VM's are being used) with a high clock speed dual-core.

Intel's i5 and any of the AMD Phenom X4(or even an X3) line of CPU's would do the trick nicely.

That is very realistic, you can get quite a lot of power under 1k.

EDIT: I did some quick searching on tigerdirect.com and found this HP ProLiant Server for $639.99 USD, if you added RAM and a 2nd drive for software RAID you would be good to go.

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For 3-4 guests you may as well just run a type 2 on top of a host os, not much benefit in going with a type 1. You could setup a central file share on the host then or have it be a print server, etc.

Thanks very much for the advice.

I always planned to upgrade the home "server" to a reasonable spec so I guess making sure it's able to run a type 1 is sensible (is KVM classed as type 1?).

I have vbox running on the existing (under-powered) machine but I think I will try KVM out of curiosity - I can always switch back to vbox.

One question I have regarding KVM - after installing KVM on the base OS, is it practical to make use of this as an OS, or should I install another Debian as a VM - this seems illogical to me, but seems to be how ESX works(?).

Thanks,

That's up to you, I would recommend "working" from a guest within that host though. The reasoning behind this is that the less software and interaction you have directly with the host, the less updates will be required..and less chances of causing an event that could impact your guest OS's. That may be overkill for a home setup, but that's the common approach.

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