Building a virtualisation rig

[Thor86]

The biggest bottleneck for a little virtual lab will be memory, and the Core i7 is worth it in higher memory capacity alone.

More spindles would help as well, but a single high-performance SSD would be faster than a bunch of HDDs in a RAID 10.

True, but you'd be spending at least 300-400 dollars for 80-120GB SSDs for min space requirements for any significant VM testing.

You could buy 4 x 500GB SATA2 spindles for under 200 dollars, and have almost a TB of drive space to play with, especially testing iSCSI SAN (Openfiler) VMs for any type of NFS/MSClustering testing.

 

[theevilsharpie]

True, but you'd be spending at least 300-400 dollars for 80-120GB SSDs for min space requirements for any significant VM testing.

You could buy 4 x 500GB SATA2 spindles for under 200 dollars, and have almost a TB of drive space to play with, especially testing iSCSI SAN (Openfiler) VMs for any type of NFS/MSClustering testing.

VMware Workstation allows you to create linked clones, which are snapshots of the master VMs whose disks start out at a few MB and grow as activity is performed in the VM. Master VM's themselves can be created with virtual disks that grow as needed.

In my VM Master directory, I have Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, OpenFiler, and Monowall, and they take up about 12.5GB. Vista, Windows 7, Server 2008, and Server 2008 R2 will take up about 10GB each, if that. I've had about 30 linked clones stored in VM folder concurrently from labs that I was running, and the entire VM folder was only about 7GB.

An 80GB SSD will be plenty, and will substantially outperform 4 mechanical hard drives in a RAID 0 array.

 

[classy]

I'll just say this then I am done. Being an MCSE to build the proper leaning setup you don't need to do all that stuff theevilsharpie is saying. Dude your going to waste your money. And only an inexperienced person would suggest using one disk, even SSD. Only someone with no real life experience would even suggested have the stuff he is talking about. Dude if you spend $200 for VMWare workstation with the free tools available your a fool.

 

[theevilsharpie]

Classy, since you feel the need to continually share your credentials with us, let me share mine. I've been working in the industry for a little over 8 years with both Microsoft and VMware technology. I've used VMware Workstation, VMware Server, VMware ESX/ESXi, Microsoft Virtual PC, Microsoft Virtual Server, and Microsoft Hyper-V server. I've been involved in very small virtualization projects (like my home lab and small ESXi servers) up to VMware Infrastructure implementation supporting about 250 VMs with a goal of 600 VMs within a year. I hold a VMware Certified Professional certification, the Microsoft Certified System Administrator certification, as well as half a dozen other certifications for various hardware and software products.

Now that we've got that dick waving contest out of the way...

VMware Workstation has a 30-day trial which the OP can use to decide for himself if it's worth the cost. It was for me, and it helped me pass my MCSE exams with flying colors. Other virtualization tools will work, but they are very slow in comparison, and time spent futzing around with your tools is time taken away from studying. Not worth it, especially if his work is paying for the machine. Also, the machine isn't going to be that expensive, since it doesn't need a particularly powerful graphics card or PSU.

As for disks, there's nothing wrong with a single SSD. This isn't a production system, and it doesn't need enterprise-grade performance or reliability. The form of virtualization discussed in this thread is overwhelmingly dominated by random I/O. The biggest determinant of random I/O performance is seek time, and that's an area where SSDs will absolutely school mechanical hard disks. In this application, a single SSD will outperform 2 fast mechanical SATA disks in a RAID 0 array, and it could very well outperform 20 disks in RAID 0. But don't take my word for it, throw a VM on a USB flash drive and see for yourself.

Since some people in this thread seem to think that I'm full of shit, I've recreated one of the clustering labs I used a few months back to pass the MCSE infrastructure design exam. The amount of time spent between defining the networks and VMs for the lab and being able to use the lab was 15 minutes, the vast majority of which was spent waiting for Windows to go through the sysprep process. An SSD will cut down on this time dramatically.

My system specs are as follows:
Opteron 185
4GB RAM w/ 4GB ReadyBoost flash drive
4 disks in a RAID 10 array

http://img32.imageshack.us/img32/7659/vmware1.png

http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/3879/vmware2k.png

http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/7595/vmware3y.png

http://img337.imageshack.us/img337/5586/vmware4.png
http://img32.imageshack.us/img32/vmware1.png/1/w1105.png

 

[Keitero]

Sharpie, VMWare is indeed very powerful and will serve just fine for the OP. However, I think that Hyper-V does offer some of these features as well such as: snapshot support, separate networks, and cloning VMs.

Now I am not saying that the OP should just abandon the idea of VMWare, just that Hyper-V might work out for him. If it doesn't work out, at least he has the option to use VMWare.

P.S. I too am working on my MCSA and found that my old copy of VMWare Workstation (5.x) is just not cutting the mustard and I can't swing $100 ATM to buy the upgrade so I figure this might work out for me as well.

 

[RedTomato]

I'm back now, and I want to say thanks to everyone who posted in this thread - I've learned an enormous amount from this thread, even or especially when people disagreed with each other.

Thanks to evilsharpie for posting so much (!), and to ViRGE for linking his pics as evilsharpie's large pics made it impossible for me to read this thread for a while. The S3 Virge was probably my first ever PC graphics card, so bit of history there.

My MCITP books have arrived now, and I've started on the first one, 70-680, Configuring Windows 7. I'm finding it unexpectedly challenging already as it jumps straight into system images and deploying them over networks, and BitLocker and BranchCache.

I'm used to working with DNS and Active Directory as I work with them every week, but these things are new to me.

Regarding hardware, the 70-680 Win 7 book says it only needs 2 VMs, and 4GB, which I can deal with easily on my macbook.

Out of all the MCITP Enterprise Administrator modules, the one with the highest requirements is the next one, 70-640, Configuring Windows Server 2008 Active Directory, which says it needs 7 active VMs and 8GB of RAM.

All the other modules say they are happy with 3 VMs or so, and around 4GB of RAM.

I think I'm gonna wait and complete 70-680 Win 7 and make a start on 70-640 Active Directory before I buy any more hardware. If I'm lucky, I should be able to get away with a m-ATX board and an i7-860 with 8GB.

Of course, I'm always suspicious of MS's 'minimum RAM requirements' which is why I'll start the module first and see how that goes. There's no point splashing out on 12GB if I only ever use that for a couple of optional labs.

To answer a couple other points in this thread: I work as a very inexperienced server admin, 2 days a week, for a charity with 50 staff and an AD structure, who are paying for my exams and books. This computer I will be paying for myself. I'd like to use it for other things apart from MCITP labs.

Someone suggested I buy some ancient Dell rackmount servers. Nice idea, but the RAM they needed was the killer. I also looked at getting a Core2Quad, which comes about £180 cheaper for mobo and chip. The DDR2 it takes costs exactly the same as DDR3.

As I'm spending my own money, I'd rather pay a bit more for something that has legs going forwards and not spend a similar amount of my money on something that is more or less at the end of its retail life.

Cheers all x RT

 

[Massive Overkill]

You're really going to regret limiting yourself to 8 gigs of RAM. Butch-up and get the 920.

This is my mobile gaming/VMware rig:

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1407916

The latest version of VMware player allows you to create and configure VM's, which earlier versions did not allow you to do (reserved for Workstation only). Workstation 7 is the bomb; I'm really digging the pause feature (not to be confused with the older suspend feature). Trying to get ESXi to run on desktop hardware is difficult at best (unless you're going to pony up for dedicated RAID card), leave it to server-class hardware.

 

[maxx8864]

For what it's worth, I'm an MCT and have been teaching Microsoft MCSE and MCITP courses plus general contracting for about 10 years. Prior to VPC I had a couple of home PCs with one GB of RAM each, when VPC became popular I upgraded to 2GB of RAM. Just this year for the first time I've bought a machine with 4GB of RAM and now run Hyper-V. I've passed over 30 Microsoft exams since 1997. If my mortgage was paid off and my kids had left home it would be completely different until then I can only dream about the ideas expressed here.

 

[sqllady]

Hi All,
I am very happy someone has started this discussion. I have built a server for virtualization
along with sharepoint 2007/2010 and here are my specs:

Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P rev 1.6
G-skill 8gigs (2x2) 240-pin DDR2 1066 (pc2 8500)Dram dual channel kit
2- LG DVD Burner -Sata GH22NS50
EVGA 512-P3-N940-LR GeForce 9400 GT 512MB 64-bit GDDR2 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready Video Card
Intel Core2 Quad Q9400 Processor @2.66ghz
Cooler Master Silent Pro M RS-600 AMBA
2- 640gb 7200rpm WD Caviar SATA/3.0gb
Cooler Master Elite RC-330 atx case

My OS is Windows Server 2008 R2. I am going to download Hyper-V. My questions is -
are there settings I need to adjust on the gigabyte motherboard to fully utilize the VM's?
To try it out I installed Vmware Virtual Server which installed and worked perfectly. My only problem was that at boot up the system would stop and after hitting the reset button it worked fine. I now have 8gigs of ram installed on a board that holds 16 gigs. I feel this is enough.
Your comments and or suggestions will be greatly appreciated.