Hyper-V Lab Setup

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Hi Guys, long time no see. Work has been very busy and certification and learning pushed to the back of the queue (as always seems to be the case). Anyway I have a need to get upto speed on the latest incarnation of Windows Server and it's virtualisation features.

I want something that will allow me to simulate a live environment as much as possible so off the top of my head I'm assuming that I'll need two machines to act as Hyper-V hosts, and a further machine to act as shared storage.

Any suggestions on hardware to get the best bang for my buck?

Is anyone aware of someone currently blogging about their Hyper-V setups in detail?

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Why two hosts? why not vSphere? and why not direct attached storage?

Yes you can go down the route you suggested but in all honesty it's not 'really' needed.

Depending on your requirements (amount of hosts, cost of servers and details on the switches you would be using would depend really on the type of environment you could set up.

For example if you had a requirement for say 5 guests then there is no reason why you couldn't do it on a single server.

A Lenovo TS200 is capable of running upto 24gb of DDR3 RDIMM memory and comes with the ability to have 4 disks internally (raid 0,1 without the upgrade key for the raid controller), has the ability to store a USB key internally so you could install vSphere onto that and use the hdd's as the datastore.

Alternatively you could get a couple of cheaper boxes, one of which could be your NAS box (iSCSI or NFS based) and try running OpenFiler, FreeNas or unRaid on it, then depending on if you had a decent switch (that did jumbo frames) you could increase network through put by implementing jumbo frames on the switch, NAS\SAN and Hyper-Visor.

You could even get a decent laptop (that can use 8gb) and do labs on that.

As far as blogs are concerned, I am just starting one up and will be detailing the setup and configuration of both vSphere and Hyper-V as well as FreeNas or OpenFiler (I haven't decided which one yet) as well as running various Microsoft Tier 1 applications on said environments (I recently purchased 4 TS200 servers, each with 24gb of ram as well as a HP Microserver to act as a backup).

 

Simon the training is to get me upto speed on Hyper-V itself no the underlining lab setup that's going to run on it. So I want experience of running multiple hosts, failover and managing storage on a dedicated host so that failover can happen.

Thanks for the info

 

Probably best to try and get some HP-ML115 or ML110 servers as they are cheap and do the job for hosting Hyper-V. Then get yourself some extra RAM 4-8GB depending on how many VM's your planning on running and another ML115 server with 3-4 hard drives and a good hardware RAID card and setup Openfiler as your SAN. Problem is if buying this whole setup your looking at over £1000.

 

I would also suggest having a look at the Lenovo TS200 servers. You will also need to make sure that your switch is managed and capable of running jumbo frames otherwise your performance is going to be shocking.

 

Amen to the managed part - but my switch doesn't run jumbo frames - I run OpenFiler and there are issues with jumbos on it. I've got no performance problems at all - my setup is awesome and runs like a dream with 20-odd VMs on three hosts. though I agree, you'd be daft NOT to run jumbos in production. i guess if you want to mirror exactly what you'll see in a production environment, then you should invest in a switch that can run jumbo frames, but if you can save a few quid and get a cheap-ass managed switch that doesn't, then spend the money on a bigger BBWC for the raid controller on whatever you;re running the shared storage on that would be my preference.

Of course, once again, I might just be arguing for the sake of it here, because there probably aren't that many managed switches around these days that can't run jumbo frames

 

Is the TS200 better than an ML110 G6 x3430?


Can't find any TS200s with a decent CPU