Virtualization vs straight os

TransformedBG · May 30, 2015

Really this thread is a question of what's more effeciant.

Right now I'm running my
phenom II 965 be
16 gigs ram
120g main drive
1tb secondary drive
5 2tb hatchi enterprise drives in raid 5 on a Dell perc5
And just a basic Nvidia graphics card

What I really want to be able to do is
1) remote in from my main desktop
2) host a basic Web page, ventillio, mumble servers
3) use my raid storage over the network
4) plex all my media
5) use the 1tb drive to record from my hd homerun prime

So I know I could obviously do most of this from windows 7 and I know it's not the ideal setup to do everything I wasn't but it's a starting point.

But i figured I would try with virtuilazation. So I go esxi 5.5 installed and running but now I'm running into the snafoo of it only allowing partitions of 2tb or less from my raid storage. If i could figure out how to fix that, that would be a plus.

But i know when I have windows 7 install I could also just run oracal virtual box and host some other os's. Reason I want to run other os's is primarily I like the functionality of Linux for running mumble and vent.

I guess I'm just looking for a little advise on which route to go.

ihrsetrdr · May 30, 2015

you can do any and all the functions you listed with a Linux install on your phenom rig. You can run several virtual enviornments with the physical resources in your sig.

Virtualbox or VMplayer are two that I would use.

In terms of "efficiency" I think that is a value judgement that you could best determine.

pcgamer4life · May 30, 2015

I'd either run a flavor of linux with Virtualbox installed, or stick to ESXi. The overhead of Windows on a CPU that old (not that it's a bad CPU, just older) will do nothing but slow you down and consume more resources than necessary. Granted, you don't need a lot of horsepower for what you want to do, but the more you have available, the better, right? ESXi will run better because it's a baremetal hypervisor, but you don't have the benefit of a host OS at your fingertips. If you're running a headless server in a closet somewhere, that's probably not an issue. Personally I switched from ESXi back to Hyper-V on Server 2012 because my dev sandbox at work sits on my desk with my main workstation and I like to be able to just swing over to it with physical access. At home I have a CentOS machine in my network closet with VirtualBox instaled.

I've never messed with RAID inside ESXi, but it's robust enough that I can't imagine there would be a limitation like the one you're talking about.. I'd keep digging into that issue.

TransformedBG · May 30, 2015

pcgamer4life said:
I'd either run a flavor of linux with Virtualbox installed, or stick to ESXi. The overhead of Windows on a CPU that old (not that it's a bad CPU, just older) will do nothing but slow you down and consume more resources than necessary. Granted, you don't need a lot of horsepower for what you want to do, but the more you have available, the better, right? ESXi will run better because it's a baremetal hypervisor, but you don't have the benefit of a host OS at your fingertips. If you're running a headless server in a closet somewhere, that's probably not an issue. Personally I switched from ESXi back to Hyper-V on Server 2012 because my dev sandbox at work sits on my desk with my main workstation and I like to be able to just swing over to it with physical access. At home I have a CentOS machine in my network closet with VirtualBox instaled.

I've never messed with RAID inside ESXi, but it's robust enough that I can't imagine there would be a limitation like the one you're talking about.. I'd keep digging into that issue.

TransformedBG said:
Really this thread is a question of what's more effeciant.

Right now I'm running my
phenom II 965 be
16 gigs ram
120g main drive
1tb secondary drive
5 2tb hatchi enterprise drives in raid 5 on a Dell perc5
And just a basic Nvidia graphics card

What I really want to be able to do is
1) remote in from my main desktop
2) host a basic Web page, ventillio, mumble servers
3) use my raid storage over the network
4) plex all my media
5) use the 1tb drive to record from my hd homerun prime

So I know I could obviously do most of this from windows 7 and I know it's not the ideal setup to do everything I wasn't but it's a starting point.

But i figured I would try with virtuilazation. So I go esxi 5.5 installed and running but now I'm running into the snafoo of it only allowing partitions of 2tb or less from my raid storage. If i could figure out how to fix that, that would be a plus.

But i know when I have windows 7 install I could also just run oracal virtual box and host some other os's. Reason I want to run other os's is primarily I like the functionality of Linux for running mumble and vent.

I guess I'm just looking for a little advise on which route to go.

I think thats the direction im heading to tell you te truth.. Im just having a hard time getting the Raid array to mount to anything.

Stratus_ss · Jun 1, 2015

Myself I went CentOS with a JBOD and let ZFS handle the raid related stuff.

I put OpenVZ on their for containers, to handle different versions of linux. I also have VirtualBox installed to handle anything that doesnt work well in a container (i.e. dns/dhcp seems to have problems being hosted in a container). I have no practical use for Windows so thats not much of a concern for me.

Really the most efficient use depends on your confort level. Containers are far more efficient than VMs but they can't run non *nix OS'. ESXi is more effecient than VB, but at the same time is not my prefered method unless you need the fancy vMotion type stuff.

TeknoBug · Jun 3, 2015

For standard VT-x or AMD-v, Virtualbox performs better than VMplayer, but for those processors with VT-d or IOMMU then the paid version of VMware or Xen works a lot better.

95blackz26 · Jun 5, 2015

i use both vmware and virtual box..good way to test out various programs before installing them in my systems..if i remember at the time i get which ever os all up to date and then copy it to a drive i use for the sole purpose of my os backups.

TransformedBG · Jun 22, 2015

Soooo after tinkering with it... i finally figured out how to do RDM mapping so i could mount the full drives in ESXI.. which makes it loads easier to remote "desktop" into. Using the vsphere client. I actually got ESXI 5.5 and 6.0 to work i just had to do some customizing for drivers

but to map the drives i followed this guide:
http://blog.davidwarburton.net/2010/10/25/rdm-mapping-of-local-sata-storage-for-esxi/

now i can let the fun begin!!!

TransformedBG · Jun 23, 2015

Virtualization vs straight os

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