Newbie to Virtulization, with all the gear and no idea.

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Hi guys,

I’m looking to learn more about Virtualization as I’m a complete novice in this field, apart from the odd virtual PC labs for study in the past. I was looking to step up the game and setting something like a server 2008 with a couple of Windows 7 clients with maybe an Exchange server, with maybe a child domain etc…Plus there have been murmurings that the company’s servers will be virtualized soon, and I’m looking for a sniff of that kind of action.

I have managed to acquire a ML115 G5 (on the guidence of the fourm) hooked up with 4GB of ram (is this enough for my requirements?). I’ve just made the leap of faith and bought a TechNet Sub (once again on the advice of this forum ). Question is which product should I use to get started – I was thinking of installing VMware Esx1 onto a USB stick ala this article . A little unsure on this one as Hyper V also looks appealing, and seeing as I now have access to server 2008, I was considering installing this. Where would everyone recommend as a starting point, which product would ideal to get started in virtualization?

I would appreciate all responses.

 

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For a start put as much ram into the server as you can afford and that it can run, 4gb for the OS and any guest OS's is not going to give you much room to play\practice. To give you an idea, my main virtualisation server has 64gb of ram but my laptop runs 8gb of ram (I run Hyper-v on the laptop, ESX or Hyper-V on the server).

 

Also there is an updated article on techhead for the USB method

 

Hi

I would put 8 gigs in that server (thats the max, I have 2 of these in a cluster) should enable you to run around 10 vm's with reasonable performance using esxi as esx has a baloon memory (only uses what it needs per vm and shares the rest). Unfortunately you wont be able to play with advanced features like Ha, Drs etc as its a singular server.

Steve.L

 

If you go with vmware, which most companies seem to do then you need this book as well http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mastering-V...=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1277584984&sr=8-1

 

Wow, 64gb of ram in that monster! I would give my right arm to have a play on that rig As I stated in the first post I only have 4gb, but after careful consideration I decided to head on over to Crucial and max the thing out with 8gb.

 

Cheers mate, this is how I will go about installing ESXi. Will I get the full learing experience from ESXi or do I need to step up to ESX - the full fat version?

 

Thanks for the heads up, just bought the book of Amazon.