Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!
I've considered moving to a baremetal hypervisor, yes. I think I'd have a few issues, though.
Disks passing through to the virtual machines is the biggest one. I wouldn't have an issue with that now because I'm using a real RAID controller, but I was considering ZFS and that completely removes that option (short of running it on a single volume, which I might as well run EXT4). This isn't a deal breaker, but it kinda sucks.
The next issue may be a non-issue. When I looked, I thought that the viewer portion of ESXi required a Windows client to manager it. I use Linux as my desktop operating system, so that is difficult to work around. I'd rather not run a virtual machine on my system to manage virtual machines on the server. That is unnecessarily complex. If there is a Linux variant, that solves this issue. I'll look into it after I type up this post.
Another major issue is related to the RAID card. I haven't found how to manage the RAID card remotely. Right now, I can fire up software to do anything on the RAID controller. With a baremetal hypervisor though, I lose that layer and can't manage it short of being right at the terminal. This isn't a huge issue, but it is very convenient to not have to stand in front of the rack or restart the server to manage disks/arrays.
Licensing is my last concern. I want to stick with a Hypervisor that is going to be around for awhile. While I don't mind reinstalling my virtual machines, it really is a pain in the *** to make sure everything is setup right.
Regardless, I'm certainly open to suggestions and I'm willing to test it out on one of the IBM servers. With as much data as I have, I can't afford to get half way through a conversion and go "oh crap this doesn't work".
EDIT: I have access to Hyper-V on MSDN. Might check that out for fun, if nothing else. Double EDIT: Maybe not, this is really limited.
I'm not sure what you mean unless you mean managing the server/server farm from its own virtual machine. If so, then yes, it is do-able, just not very convenient should something go wrong. Because if you have connection issues or that virtual machine goes down, you'd have to startup a local virtual machine or restart into Windows.EDIT2: Something stupid just popped on my mind. ESXi and XCP only have full free Windows clients (ESXi VMs can be managed via WS9). Running a VM on your client to manage a VM is just ridiculous. But what about running a XP VM on your server, and then connecting to it via RDP to manage XCP/ESXi?
I'm not sure what you mean unless you mean managing the server/server farm from its own virtual machine. If so, then yes, it is do-able, just not very convenient should something go wrong. Because if you have connection issues or that virtual machine goes down, you'd have to startup a local virtual machine or restart into Windows.
I'm still trying to figure out how I want to re-do the file server. Passing through a 14TB virtual disk just seems a little excessive. I could break it up into multiple disks ("backup", "media", etc) or even multiple servers, if I wanted.
I also want to figure out how difficult disaster recovery is. If I have a server go down hard, I want to know what kind of trouble I'm in. For example, if the storage containers are nigh-impossible to open, then I'll need to have backups of the virtual machines. But if I can simply mount the array, I'll be less worried about it. From what I can tell, the latter is true.
Without the shared backend, you can still transfer the virtual machine between servers, even while running. The shared storage is to speed up the transfer and create a HA environment, where if a host goes down, the instance can be started on another host immediately.edit: what I got from your post = if you use XCP with the VM's stored on iSCSI they can move b/t servers with minimal impact...is that right?
It gives me the option of ovf, ova, gz, vhd, vmdk, and xva for import file types.
I don't really have anything to compare it to and nothing to measure it with.so how loud is your rack ive always wondered what thin servers sound like? err i guess you took out the thin ones i think you said. but how loud was it?