Bare Metal Hypervisor

JeanM

Hi,

My experience with VM products have been limited to MS Virtual Server 2005, VMWare workstation and player.

I will be building a new quad-core pc with 8-16gigs of ram, and would like to play with a bare metal type hypervisor.

What do you guys recommend that I can download as a trial version that will work intel 2500k type of motherboards/cpu?

Would you recommend VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) or VMware vSphere or something else?


http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/server/compare.html

thanks!

kriscamaro68

Here is a link to hyper-v: Download: Microsoft® Hyper-V

If microsoft floats your boat I would go that route. It installs server core and allows gui administration with the install of remote admin tools on any workstation.

brad_121

Check out the vmware hardware compatibility guide: VMware Compatibility Guide: System Search

The esxi hypervisor is super easy to install and manage (and free!). If you want to learn about vmware, i'd use that.

You do also have the option of virtualizing the esxi hypervisor. I've done exactly that on my win7 box. Basically how i've got it working is:
Win7 x64 with vmware workstation which has a vm of esxi. Then on my win7 box, i have the vsphere client which I use to connect to the esxi installation and then build vm's on that. So a vm running inside a vm!
Only restriction is the vm running on top of esxi can't be x64

Hope that helps...

JeanM

Thanks! I'll download Hyper-V hypervisor and also look for the free esxi hypervisor as well. I don't want to run a VM within a VM, I do want to basically play with bare metal hypervisors and then install a couple 3-4 VM's in that.

What version of esxi hypervisor did you install, and what hardware did you use it and / results?