virtualization options for MCITP

Hey,

Just started learning for 70-640 exam, but I am currently fuming over virtualization options for the windows server 2008 instances i will need.

I have to do everything from my laptop, it runs a windows 7 home premium and I currently use windows virtual PC v6.0.192.0.

I do not think I am able to do everything I need with this cause windows 7 home premium does not allow virtual pc to use all the features.

So as far as I know I have to upgrade my OS to windows 7 professional to make those features available (which i will need for the testing as far as I know)

Now I do not feel like spending 80+ dollars on an upgrade I am not sure I will need.

So my question is: does VMware player, or any other virtualization software that is free, work properly for the testing I will need to do on my windows 7 home premium. Or do I have to get it upgraded to windows 7 professional either way?

Thanks for the info

Alex

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Comments

RobertKaucher

Jander1023 wrote: »

I think this is where I am confused. So, Hyper-V server is like Core but you can run multiple sessions on the same hardware, sharing resources? I am used to VMWare at work, where we can log into the VM Server and it looks like a regular server.

I'm not sure I understand this. What is "a regular server" and what do you mean by login? When you say VMware you meanESX or ESXi, right?

Thre are two (native) ways you can log into ESX/ESXi: SSH/Telnet or via the vSphere management console.

RobertKaucher

MentholMoose wrote: »

They are both type 1. The Wikipedia entry even says this.

Most people don't know the fact that the "host" OS on Hyper-V is really just a special type of VM.

Jander1023

RobertKaucher wrote: »

I'm not sure I understand this. What is "a regular server" and what do you mean by login? When you say VMware you meanESX or ESXi, right?

Thre are two (native) ways you can log into ESX/ESXi: SSH/Telnet or via the vSphere management console.

I am familiar with using the vSphere console for VMWare. By "log into" I mean access the server thru a GUI interface. By "regular server" I mean it has a GUI desktop as opposed to Core which only uses command line interface.

For studying at home, I use Windows Virtual PC to run Server 2008. I want to get more familiar with Hyper-V, which is why I want to start using it for my VMs. I'll probably just dual boot my PC into Server R2 x64, then play with the Hyper-V console a bit. I think I am over-complicating the issue and confusing myself!

Miikey87

I set up a Hyper-v Server box for my testing. Took me about 2 hours to configure it up before I had my first VM on its way.

The only thing is if your running your DC on the box, using your Hyper-V management console on your PC can be a bit of a pain. However HVRemote makes things easy to setup. Hyper-V Remote Management Configuration Utility - Release: HVRemote Version 0.7

Runs nice and stable, remove randomly added SCSI drive when you create your VM's this was causing BSOD's on my VM's once gone i havent had a server go down for weeks now.

RobertKaucher

Jander1023 wrote: »

I am familiar with using the vSphere console for VMWare. By "log into" I mean access the server thru a GUI interface. By "regular server" I mean it has a GUI desktop as opposed to Core which only uses command line interface.

VMware does not have a GUI desktop at all. This was actually why I was asking. So I suspect there is some confusion of terms here. Either I am misunderstanding, or you have your concepts mixed up. With VMware ESX/i you have your chice of the "unsupported" console, which is a Linux command shell, or vSphere. There is no desktop environment for it natively. I've never heard of anyone putting X on an ESX install... But I may be misinformed (although I doubt that in this instance).

Jander1023 wrote: »

For studying at home, I use Windows Virtual PC to run Server 2008. I want to get more familiar with Hyper-V, which is why I want to start using it for my VMs. I'll probably just dual boot my PC into Server R2 x64, then play with the Hyper-V console a bit. I think I am over-complicating the issue and confusing myself!

That's a good way to go. I run a Hyper-V system test lab and use a combination of Hyper-V Console and RDP to manage them. I couldn't get the hardware to work with ESXi. I am actually going to be redoing my test lab completely as I now have an MSDN subscruption.

Flexie

For my test lab, what would be the preferable hardware setup. Taking that I will be doing virtualization. Is it still best if I put in some physical network between different hosts? For the 70-640 exam, how many instances of windows 2008/2003 should I be able to run simultaneously to get the best lab experience?

ehnde

Flexie wrote: »

For my test lab, what would be the preferable hardware setup. Taking that I will be doing virtualization. Is it still best if I put in some physical network between different hosts? For the 70-640 exam, how many instances of windows 2008/2003 should I be able to run simultaneously to get the best lab experience?

You will need ALOT of ram. Server 2008 R2 does best as a virtual machine with at least 1gb of ram. Maybe you could get away with less if you run Server Core in some of the VMs

dual or quad core AMD or Intel cpu with virtualization support (AMD will be a bit cheaper usually)
at least 4gb of ram, but preferrably at least 6gb. 12gb would not be unreasonable if you find that cost effective.
multiple hard drives
probably want additional NICs for each VM network you create

An otherwise fast computer with a single hard drive could be a bottleneck.

Flexie

ehnde wrote: »

You will need ALOT of ram. Server 2008 R2 does best as a virtual machine with at least 1gb of ram. Maybe you could get away with less if you run Server Core in some of the VMs

dual or quad core AMD or Intel cpu with virtualization support (AMD will be a bit cheaper usually)

at least 4gb of ram, but preferrably at least 6gb. 12gb would not be unreasonable if you find that cost effective.

multiple hard drives

probably want additional NICs for each VM network you create

An otherwise fast computer with a single hard drive could be a bottleneck.

I currently just have a laptop (my work does not allow usage of their recourses for this) it sports 4 Gb of ram and i7 quad 1.6ghz (with 3.2 ghz overdrive) and just the one hard drive.

I can get a NIC or 2 and I have a few external hard drives. Are there any other people with experience of using a personal low budget test lab?

I am currently successfully running 3 instances simultaneously on it, but not yet connecting them together or putting extra roles on them apart from just starting up and running.

za3bour

Flexie wrote: »

I currently just have a laptop (my work does not allow usage of their recourses for this) it sports 4 Gb of ram and i7 quad 1.6ghz (with 3.2 ghz overdrive) and just the one hard drive.

I can get a NIC or 2 and I have a few external hard drives. Are there any other people with experience of using a personal low budget test lab?

I am currently successfully running 3 instances simultaneously on it, but not yet connecting them together or putting extra roles on them apart from just starting up and running.

You will be fine I have lower specs and been able to run 5 servers together at same time with no problem if you could upgrade memory though that would be better.

MentholMoose

Flexie wrote: »

I currently just have a laptop (my work does not allow usage of their recourses for this) it sports 4 Gb of ram and i7 quad 1.6ghz (with 3.2 ghz overdrive) and just the one hard drive.

I can get a NIC or 2 and I have a few external hard drives. Are there any other people with experience of using a personal low budget test lab?

I am currently successfully running 3 instances simultaneously on it, but not yet connecting them together or putting extra roles on them apart from just starting up and running.

An 8GB DDR3 kit for a laptop is US $140, so upgrade if you can afford it. You can sell your existing 4GB for about $50 on eBay. With 8GB of RAM you should be able to run enough VMs running the roles you need on that laptop.

As long as the machine can handle the VMs, there is not much need for physical network equipment. Things might start getting complicated if you want to simulate multiple sites on different subnets (each on their own virtual network) since you will need to have a VM functioning as a router to route traffic between the virtual networks, but it is certainly possible.

ehnde

za3bour wrote: »

You will be fine I have lower specs and been able to run 5 servers together at same time with no problem if you could upgrade memory though that would be better.

Got any tips for improving performance? I have trouble running more than 3 VMs at a time on my box that has 4gb of ram! (it will do it, just slow)

RobertKaucher

ehnde wrote: »

Got any tips for improving performance? I have trouble running more than 3 VMs at a time on my box that has 4gb of ram! (it will do it, just slow)

SSD. It made my crappy little Toshiba laptop nearly as fast as my quadcore desktop. If you cannot afford that try ready boost.

MentholMoose

RobertKaucher wrote: »

SSD. It made my crappy little Toshiba laptop nearly as fast as my quadcore desktop.

Agreed. An SSD is fantastic for labbing. Yeah, it's way faster than a regular disk, but there's one benefit in particular that I think gets overlooked. With a regular disk, memory swapping really causes horrible slowness, whereas an SSD can handle massive amounts of swapping without much performance hit.

With VirtualBox, Hyper-V, Virtual PC/Server, and other products that don't support memory overcommitment, you can give VMs minimal RAM, and performance will still be fine. The OS running in the VM will use swap space, but since it's on a super fast disk, the performance hit is not bad. If you use TechNet Virtual Labs, which appears to use Virtual Server, you will find that some of the VMs have 100MB of RAM or less, and it works fine. It works because they must have very fast storage for the VMs to allow the heavy disk swapping that results. With VirtualBox I can assign Server 2003 VMs 128MB of RAM and it will work fine.

VMware ESX/ESXi supports memory overcommitment, so by using it you gain some flexibility and maybe even performance. ESX has memory balloon functionality, so when there's contention among VMs for the overcommitted RAM, the balloon program running in the VMs will force the OS to swap to disk. In extreme cases, this won't be enough, so the hypervisor itself will do some swapping. ESX/ESXi 4.1 even supports memory compression, so it compresses the RAM that needs to be swapped, resulting in less disk activity at the expense of some increased CPU usage.

As long as you have fast storage such as an SSD, this swapping (even at the hypervisor level) isn't much of an issue. Where you can gain performance is under normal circumstances, when there isn't contention for the RAM. The memory usage in VMs can spike up to whatever you assign them, instead of being forced to constantly swap like would be the case if they only had a tiny amount of RAM. If they aren't spiking at the same time, there is no performance hit from the overcommitment.

I've done some labs under fairly extreme conditions, even over 100% memory overcommitment (i.e. assigning 2GB of RAM to VMs when only 1GB was available), and performance was OK with an SSD. Since upgrading to SSDs, I've yet to cause a lab to grind to a halt like used to happen on my previous lab machine (and that has a 4 disk RAID 10 array on a LSI hardware RAID card, not exactly a performance slouch).

Jander1023

Ok, here's another question - can you run 64bit VM within a 32bit OS? As an example - I have 32bit Win7. Can I create and run a 64bit VM? Or do I need to be running 64bit Win7?

I am considering dual-booting Win Server 08 R2, then running my VMs with Hyper-V. However, most of the labs for the 646 only require two VMs. If I dual-boot R2, then I'll have to wipe it within 6 months, thus losing all my VMs. I don't expect to be completed with all my MCITP exams within 6 months.

RobertKaucher

Jander1023 wrote: »

Ok, here's another question - can you run 64bit VM within a 32bit OS? As an example - I have 32bit Win7. Can I create and run a 64bit VM? Or do I need to be running 64bit Win7?

I am considering dual-booting Win Server 08 R2, then running my VMs with Hyper-V. However, most of the labs for the 646 only require two VMs. If I dual-boot R2, then I'll have to wipe it within 6 months, thus losing all my VMs. I don't expect to be completed with all my MCITP exams within 6 months.

You can actually get by for about 240 days using SLMGR witht he eval version of 2008 R2. But it would not destroy your VMs. Just don't format the disk; or you could create a partition to store the VMs.