VM servers

[botat29]

I want to build 2 x VM servers the first one will probably receive VMware Workstation and the second one Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. I don’t need a huge power since those servers will be experimental only, But I would like to have 6 cores, my first tough was to use a dual xeon board , but I say to my self that I can save a lot of buck going with AMD 6 cores Phenom.
So here for now what I would like to use

Phenom II X6 1090T
MSI 890FXA-GD70

[JD]

Why not run ESXi? I don't really see the point in using Hyper-V and especially don't see the point in using VMware Workstation on a dedicated VM box...

Only issue is, ESXi has a limited amount of supported hardware so you'd have to be careful in your hardware choices.

[botat29]

You may right about WMware WS, I may keep it on my i7 platform over a Windows 7 for testing too. Now for my 2 servers; may be interesting to have both Hyper-V and ESXi, want to use Hyper-V for testing Windows Servers, I get it free with my technet. I just check the compatibility page of ESXi, interesting, they list a lot of Opterons, and Xeons, but the only boards listed I can find are Intel.

[Chilly]

Originally Posted by botat29

You may right about WMware WS, I may keep it on my i7 platform over a Windows 7 for testing too. Now for my 2 servers; may be interesting to have both Hyper-V and ESXi, want to use Hyper-V for testing Windows Servers, I get it free with my technet. I just check the compatibility page of ESXi, interesting, they list a lot of Opterons, and Xeons, but the only boards listed I can find are Intel.

Ignore the board listings, just make sure that the main things you plan to use are listed, that being NICs, CPUs, Chipsets and HBA(storage controller, be it a raid card or HBA).

Hyper-V isn't that bad, while I do prefer ESXi and vCenter, Hyper-V, at least the version in 2008R2 SP1 is getting there.

In any case Windows Server and Client OSes run GREAT and are fully supported in ESXi and licencing is the same(for each enterprise 2008 or 2008 r2 licence you can run 4 virtual instances on one physical box, be it Hyper-V or ESXi).

[botat29]

So simple question, witch board do you know it work well with ESXi ?

[BlueByte]

For a basic setup almost any board will work, I have even bastardized ESXi 3.x on a Intel atom board(That was far more work then it was worth seeing if I could) Just check on the on board NIC, and be prepared to buy a RAID card as most of the on board stuff will not work with a raided datastore, or if it does it cant be the primary datastore.

I have done both server level and desktop components, and if its only for testing.... Go the cheap route if you don't need more then 16GB of RAM(dont think you can swap ram...that kills speed faster then anything). if you have anything that hosts iscsi laying around you could even boot a USB stick to ESXi and use iscsi as your datastore... over a 1gig lan it will not slow down performance(much) if you separate the iscsi traffic from the regular network. Saves on an extra RAID setup if you already have another one somewhere else on your network.