RE: VMware - Call me thick

["Paul Gordon" <paul_gordon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have successfully run WHS under both VMware server and under ESXi -
both
are free products, which you use depends on whether you need to run
anything
*else* actually on the metal, since ESXi is what is often referred to as a
"bare metal hypervisor" - i.e. it runs directly on the hardware
not on top
of an installation of Windows. I had a situation where I needed to run
Geovision on the hardware (since the GV card cannot be made available to a
VM), hence I installed Windows server on the machine itself, then installed
VMware server on top of that to run my other virtual machines.

Therein lies another important factor... - the hardware available to any
running guest machines is limited to only what the virtualisation product
makes available... In practice this pretty much rules out any & all
applications which require specialist hardware - in my case Geovision, but
the same would apply to other capture cards as well... The main popular
hypervisors all support mapping RS232 ports through to the VM, so your DIGI
card supplied serial interfaces would most likely be OK - provided that you
have drivers available for the host OS - which again may rule out ESXi
since
it has an extremely limited range of supported hardware - check with Digi
to
see if they have ESX drivers available for the particular cards - if they
don't that would also probably eliminate ESXi as your choice of
virtualisation platform. The same applies to USB, - as I recall, I think
VMware server does support USB to the guest machines, but ESXi does not.
(but I might be thinking of VMware Workstation instead).

Yes, the WHS client backup functionality absolutely works as normal when
running as a VM.

You *can* still utilise the WHS disk management functionality and enable
duplication... - if you have multiple hard disks in the physical host
machine, then configure the guest VM to have multiple virtual hard disks,
and place each virtual hard disk file on the separate drives. - You can of
course also setup the VM to utilise the drives directly, - but that demands
that the entire drive is dedicated to the guest VM that it is mapped to,
which is less flexible... (but better performing). Whichever you do, the
WHS
VM should just "see" these as if they were real physical attached
hard
disks.

The paid-for VMware products don't come cheap, so you *really* don't want
to
go down that road! - Unless you need some serious enterprise grade features
(which I doubt!) there's no need to consider anything more than the choice
of the freely available products.

HTH

Paul G.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: ukha_d@xxxxxxx [mailto:ukha_d@xxxxxxx] On
> Behalf Of Neil Wrightson
> Sent: 05 July 2010 10:51
> To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
> Subject: [ukha_d] VMWare - Call me thick
>
> Hi All,
>
> I read with great interest "Martyn Wendon's Four Nodes"
> In here he mentions VMWare (which I've heard of before) and was
thinking
> this would be something I would like to implement.
> My HA system as it stands has two PC's. A WHS (19" 2RU Box) and a
XP (19"
> 4RU Box) with Misterhouse, xAP, xPL on it.
> I'm looking at reducing this back to a single PC, probably the
(19" 4RU
Box).
> They both have Digi 8 Port serial cards for the various HA interface
bit's
and
> pieces.
>
> I also have another 8 port Geovision (19" 4RU Box) that is not
doing
anything.
>
> My understanding of the VMWare, is that I can create many virtual
machines
> that can reside inside the one box.
> These images, once setup, can be transferred between PC box's. So if
the
> 4RU box died, they could be transferred to the 2RU box etc.
>
> So without having to re-create the WHS box, I can make an image as it
stands
> and transfer it to the other box as a virtual machine?
> If WHS works with VMWare, how does WHS & VMWare handle the way WHS
> utilizes the many hard disks into a single volume?
> Does the WHS backups of client PC's still work?
>
>
>
>
> Now for the thick part.
> I'm looking on the VMWare website and it just isn't clear to me, what
I
need
> to download (and possibly buy).
>
>
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Neil Wrightson.
>
>
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>



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