Anyone into playing with HyperV / Vmware?

[UncleFester]

Picked up an utter bargain off eBay.

Dell R900 2U Server - £119

2 x 73Gb SAS - RAID0 for OS
64Gb Ram
4 x 6 core 2.3Ghz HT Xeon CPU - 24 effective cores
Dual 900W PSU
4 port PCIE intel NIC

Added for another £160

Matrox G550 card - no Server 2012 drivers for ATI ES1000.
4 x 146Gb SAS HS discs - set as RAID5 for data / VM disks
64Gb RAM


Runs a treat! Ok it ain't the quietest of things sat under my desk but for a decent spec to run virtual machines with / crunch stuff / render stuff it's an utter bargain.

Been teaching myself HyperV, migrating machines, Veeam and all the associated gubbins that go with it.

Really surprised just how cheap good spec ex corporate stuff is, this would have been several thousand pounds not so long ago.
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2017 Z1000SX

[The Shaggy D.A.]

I use it at work, and have my eye on some old kit to "store offsite"
____________________
Chances are quite high you are not in my Monkeysphere, and I don't care about you. Don't take it personally.
Currently : Royal Enfield 350 Meteor
Previously : CB100N > CB250RS > XJ900F > GT550 > GPZ750R/1000RX > AJS M16 > R100RT > Bullet 500 > CB500 > LS650P > Bullet Electra X & YBR125 > Bullet 350 "Superstar" & YBR125 Custom > Royal Enfield Classic 500 Despatch Limited Edition (28 of 200) & CB Two-Fifty Nighthawk > ER5

[colink98]

Been using vMware for a while now.
VSP and VSTP certified.

you would have thought it was common place but in many SMEs they just don't have the experience or understanding to implement these things.

Starwinds offer their vSan software free for up to 2 nodes
[url]https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san?gclid=CN-v2Imu-9ECFcm87QodAYgKWg
[/url]

this is worth playing with as it gives you some idea of how to work with SANs and also tolerance / HA systems.

i assume your running 3.5 inch SAS drives...
Do you have any spare bays as i'm sure i have a few knocking about which came out of my back up server.
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PCX125 (stolen) - CBF600 (current)
Ride it like you stole it.
ride sensible and not like an idiot and you wont get 6 points in one week.

[UncleFester]

[colink98]

[Serendipity]

[Derivative]

On my old desktop machine (6-core consumer, i7-5820K IIRC) I used to run qemu with a bunch of VMs for stuff like running Windows gaming side by side with Linux on a desktop machine. Nice and easy to back up VM images, etc.

Biggest concern for me at that price would be power usage. You could likely spend more than the capex annually on electricity if you nail it. Might not be a concern just something to be aware of (I got a vaguely accurate power meter for a tenner from amazon)

[UncleFester]

Oh it's only on when I need to use it. I'm not daft lol
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2017 Z1000SX

[linuxyeti]

[TackledArchon]

Oh, that Starwinds program is pretty good by the way. We're using their free version at work between our servers, and thanks to it, we didn't loose any our data after one of the servers went to Valhalla

Cool thing is that our database kept running when that happened.

[Northern Monkey]

[UncleFester]

Long as you clean out the PSU of dust / replace the CPU thermal paste - these old things are pretty much bullet proof.

Parts are also cheap and plentiful if you know where to look. Of course that doesn't interest a datacentre but for a bit of light home tinkering, they're now perfect.
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2017 Z1000SX

[chris-red]

[kawakid]

Use vmWare at work and have done for quite some time now.

Not really an expert at vmWare, my virtual servers run on there, with their storage on Netapp. Not a big setup about 30 vms in all. But these run on 3 physical servers.

I've just removed an ESX host, with 90 odd gb of ram. They tend to get left in the warehouse and then disposed of a few years after.
(Literally me and colleague removing HDs and borrowing a hard hat and glasses and a sledge hammer from facilities).

Never really thought of selling tbh. I often wonder what other firms do, owners would be pretty worried about data tbh. (even though it's all on the Netapp).

Now for some controversy I always preferred XenServer.
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I've a twin and a 4.

[t121anf]

Our old servers go to WEEE waste, hard drive removed and shredded on site.

Used VMware at home and work, stopped at home as I gained little from it.

[The Shaggy D.A.]

2 down, 7 to go. Just because our DHCP is running on Server 2003, the "thou shalt not use an unsupported OS" rule means the NHS can spend way too much money on Dell PowerEdge R330's to replace the old kit.
____________________
Chances are quite high you are not in my Monkeysphere, and I don't care about you. Don't take it personally.
Currently : Royal Enfield 350 Meteor
Previously : CB100N > CB250RS > XJ900F > GT550 > GPZ750R/1000RX > AJS M16 > R100RT > Bullet 500 > CB500 > LS650P > Bullet Electra X & YBR125 > Bullet 350 "Superstar" & YBR125 Custom > Royal Enfield Classic 500 Despatch Limited Edition (28 of 200) & CB Two-Fifty Nighthawk > ER5

[colink98]

[ScaredyCat]

Use KVM with virsh at work. It's really nice to work with, a few bash scripts and some replication and any vm is available on any of the bare metal boxes. Used to use vmware but ditched it. KVM will use vmdk's so no problems moving.

Boxes are quite powerful 40 core E5-2650, mirrored SSDs for OS and db servers then lots and lots of disks in raid 6.

All this makes a big change from the shitty hardware we used to run it all on.

The biggest success in this was dd'ing a machine over ssh that hadn't been turned off for 8 years (and it was about 12 years old) and successfully starting it as a vm. Original box died and never came back. So much cheering and patting of self on back over the preemptive vm creation and no loss of service.
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Honda CBF125 ➝ NC700X
Honda CBF125 ↳ Speed Triple

[wots]

Veeam, pretty much earns me the money to buy eleventy bikes.

Excellent product. Replicating VMWare between customer site and multiple datacentres.

Customers love it, bailed two customers out with ransomware attacks because of this, DR is bliss too. In the process of converting another customer over to this now.
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Currently: Yamaha DT 125 LC2,Repsol Fireblade, and Bumblebee MSX 125

[Im-a-Ridah]

Servers look awesome but they have small high speed fans that make a stupid amount of noise. I use an FX6300 and its near silent

[The Shaggy D.A.]

3 main data centres, Northampton, Kettering and Wellingborough, about 50 sites dotted around Northamptonshire.
____________________
Chances are quite high you are not in my Monkeysphere, and I don't care about you. Don't take it personally.
Currently : Royal Enfield 350 Meteor
Previously : CB100N > CB250RS > XJ900F > GT550 > GPZ750R/1000RX > AJS M16 > R100RT > Bullet 500 > CB500 > LS650P > Bullet Electra X & YBR125 > Bullet 350 "Superstar" & YBR125 Custom > Royal Enfield Classic 500 Despatch Limited Edition (28 of 200) & CB Two-Fifty Nighthawk > ER5

[UncleFester]

[Im-a-Ridah]

The speed improvements of this years chips over those of 4 years ago are pretty moderate.

https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph9483/76275.png