Hyper-v or Vmware workstation

[Mucka]

Hi

I'm just about to rebuild my microserver into my test lab for vm's which would you say was the better product for vms?

Hyper-v or VMware workstaion

I have not gone down the esxi route.

Cheers

[DanceswithUnix]

I run Centos on my server, and use the native Linux kvm for my servers.

[peterb]

I never quite got on with LVM, so I use virtual box.

It's best feature is that it will run on Linux, OSX (nor really surprising as the is BSD based) and Windows.

Apart from a Linux box, I'm running it on OSX to host Windows 7 and Fedora 22. Works well.

Both are freely available so you can try them out!

(Never tried running a VM on a VM...)

[Dashers]

Why haven't you gone down the ESXi route? I've done all and it's the best I've used so far.

VMWare workstation costs, so you have to consider that. Hyper-V only has the Windows license cost (not that it's much cheaper).

Hyper-V is (allegedly) a type-1 hypervisor, where as Workstation is a type-2.

For day-to-day what this really means is that with Workstation you have to be logged onto the desktop of your server to be able to use your virtual machines. If your system resets your VMs won't start automatically. Hyper-V runs in the background.

I use Workstation daily as a developer with different VMs that I interact with. I use ESXi (a Type1) for longer running things on my server.

For learning, I use Workstation locally, no point running it on a server if I'm not leaving it running long term.

[shaithis]

ESX is the hypervisor to run with TBH.

My experience of Hyper-V is that it's a frustrating product to use, especially when compared to ESX/vCenter.

VMWare Workstation (as it's name implies) is more of a ad-hoc workstation product (although still really good).

[b0redom]

My only reason for not using ESX would be if you're not running the Microserver headless. ie if you have to have a screen , keyboard and desktop running on it.

If this is the case I'd be looking at running whatever OS you want/need and VirtualBox (which is free) on top.

I use VMWare Fusion on my Mac, but only because when I started using it many moons ago it was better than VirtualBox, and it has some integration with ESX now, so I don't have to run a separate VM for the VSphere console.

[Bluecube]

Another vote for ESXi which runs brilliantly on a Microserver. For lab and experimental work, you'd be daft not to use ESXi. It's not particularly complicated to set up either.

[Dashers]

Another possibility if you're running an active (Linux) desktop but don't necessarily want to interact with your VMs directly is Xen hypervisor. I used that inbetween VMWare Server and ESXi, was pretty good way of managing resources. Although nowhere as slick as VMWare.

[Mucka]

I looked into esxi but its not possible to stream hd media via the graphic card so i need an OS.
I also need raid 5 for my storage.

[Bluecube]

Why do you need to use the graphics card for streaming? ESXi is a hyper visor. You need an OS running on top of it it to do anything anyway.

[Dashers]

I looked into esxi but its not possible to stream hd media via the graphic card so i need an OS.
I also need raid 5 for my storage.

It is possible to pass through graphics cards to a guest so you can connect up directly. But it's hardware dependent and a little tricky to setup. So yeah, if you're using the computer as a media PC fairly constantly with some lab stuff on the side, then back to what you've suggested. If you're already running Windows (Pro only?) it makes sense to go with the free Hyper-V and see how you get on with that.

Real RAID is done at the hardware level, it doesn't matter if you're running ESXi or anything else, the OS will just see a storage device available to it, it won't have any awareness of the configuration. Psuedo-RAID with things like the Intel chipset aren't "real" in that they are defined by the OS drivers. You can work around this but you need to boot the ESXi host off of another device (e.g. a USB stick) and then pass through your disks directly to the guest OS, but that also excludes them from storing other VMs (unless you then pass storage back to the host with NFS, but that gets a little messy!).