lol - nested setups can go a long way

Only just noticed that I actually managed to get the thing to 100% (sort of) haha

So yea -nested all the way - and it goes a long way ..

One physical host but running a 5.0 Cluster, 6.0 Cluster and 5.1 vCloud Director Infrastructure ...

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chopsticks

Sorry I'm still a noob at this, may I find out what is nested setups?

nosoup4u

I cringe at the thought of the i/o on this thing!

Pickup a cheap 2 socket L5520 or X5650 setup, love my 24 core lab!

jibbajabba

A vSphere cluster usually contains multiple physical hosts (2 or more) and requires all the necessary management parts. Such as vCenter, Domain Controller and so on.

However in lab environments this can get very expensive. Not many people have the room, money and electricity bill to have multiple physical hosts + capacity for all the management stuff.

Nested setups using only one physical server or PC and run the hypervisor, here ESXi, as virtual machine.

So you could for example run VMware Workstation on your PC at home and run vSphere as VM and build yourself a cluster without the expensive bits.

Well, kinda, you still need a lot of Ram and really SSD drives to make it fast enough to be less frustrating

This is not suitable for production environments but certain is well suited for lab environments to study.

jibbajabba

chopsticks wrote: »

Sorry I'm still a noob at this, may I find out what is nested setups?

Not bad at all. It has a 1TB SSDH (Hybrid) and 480GB SSD. Its flying actually. I even hit 'suspend' on all vApps now and it took only moments.

Kinda flies actually. lol what you don't see here is that the vCloud setup even has multiple VMs running but it has its own vcenter so it won't be visible here.

chopsticks

Oh so you mean first I'll run a VM, and then within the VM, I run a vSphere cluster of VMs managed by vCenter and so on, hence a nested setup (ie, VMs within VMs within VMs)?

JeanM

Lol nice! I deff. need an SSD drive for my VCP lab, got enough ram and cpu but I/O is slow w/o SSD.

1x 3220 8gb
2x 5440 24gb (I'll probably sell this one and replace with i7 with 32gb)
2x 5540 32gb for now, but can jump to 192gb, but will only upgrade to 64 or maybe 96gb.

jibbajabba

chopsticks wrote: »

Oh so you mean first I'll run a VM, and then within the VM, I run a vSphere cluster of VMs managed by vCenter and so on, hence a nested setup (ie, VMs within VMs within VMs)?

One less level. On your Physical PC or Server you run VMs which you use to build a cluster.

So in this case - the physical server is a Dell T5500 Workstation .. I installed ESXi on it and run ESXi as VM and on those ESXI VMs other VMs

Most people probably use VMware Workstation for example in which inside they run virtual ESXi hosts.

I mean just to show you how crazy you can go:

So on my Surface Pro 2 I got a vCenter inside VMware Workstation and a single ESXi host - nested

This is not really useable to be honest. The Surface just doesn't have the RAM capacity to do anything useful, but because you cannot update standalone hosts with update manager, I have a vCenter as a VM which I can use to attach standalone hosts to and update them (might not actually make sense to you right now). The ESXi host I just installed to demonstrate it to you so it hopefully makes it a bit clearer.

ehnde

It has a 1TB SSDH (Hybrid) and 480GB SSD.

At first I thought "wow....that must have cost a fortune to get a 480GB SSD!". But after a quick search I found a 1/2TB SSD on amazon for $238. The price on those is dropping like a rock

jibbajabba

Here in the UK I paid for that one around $270.

Asif Dasl

jibbajabba wrote: »

Here in the UK I paid for that one around $270.

Don't you just love European prices!

Nice setup too Jibba, I must play around with my lab more to build something like yours - I fear breaking my lab too much that I'll have to rebuild it! I gotta do it though...

Itrimble

I'd like to upgrade my rig. I'm looking at the 4790K. It supports VT-D. The price is $339 on Amazon / Newegg. It's got 4 cores for 8 logical CPU's. What's your general recommendation for lab's?
Is the rule 1 thread per cpu?
Will my performance suffer dramatically after I have more than 8 running VM's?
The machine also will have 64gb of memory.

jibbajabba

Whatever you can afford to be honest. You will find out very quickly that you are likely be memory and storage I/O limited rather than CPU..

Even the lab above usually sits at 50% CPU, if that.

I mean a lot of people use the HP Microserver which really has a pathetic CPU and people are alright with it but cry that they run out of RAM.

One solution doesn't fit all. It really depends what you intend to do with the server.

For example ... I never HAVE TO run all of the above VMs. In fact, most of them are off at any given time as I only require the set I am working on.

Have a look here in the virtualization forum and you can find a LOT of threads of people discussing lab setups.