Hey Padre There are a plethora of Virtual Servers out there How about an episode that tou...

[G+_Cary Brown]

Hey Padre...  There are a plethora of Virtual Servers out there... How about an episode that touches on what VM's are and how to setup your own VM server.  I run the free VMWare ESXi at home and imagine it would be great for the Know How community to test the waters with a new Linux Distro or setup a dedicated server (VoIP, VPN, WebServer, FreeNAS, etc...).  There are other Oracle VMServers available as well on Linux.  I've run at least three small LInux VM's on an Intel i3 with 8GB RAM without breaking a sweat...  Easy to backup and restore VM's to new hardware too.  Keep up the great work and fantastic KH episodes week after week... #vm   #knowhow   #diy  

[G+_Henry Alexander]

Where is the software available specifically free esxi

[G+_Ben Tyger]

Yea. I like the idea doing a hyervisior show. Give the a general run down of what virtualization can do. Then maybe give recommendations on a hypervisor depending how and what you are deploying on.

 

For bare-metal: esxi, xenserver, hyper-v essentials, proxmox (kvm / xen ) distro

 

Existing server / desktop: VirtualBox (cross-platform), VMW Workstation (cross-platform), KVM (Linux centric), Hyper-V (Windows centric) ?

[G+_Ben Tyger]

Henry Alexander You have to sign in to vmware's site and you can download and get a free license for esxi. Personally is wouldn't use ESXi for a new deployment unless I knew I could / would buy a license. With ESXi 5.5 they have seriously limited the ability to manage VMs without buying a vSphere license.

[G+_Henry Alexander]

a show on how to setup a thin client using open source software would be cool

[G+_Cary Brown]

Ben Tyger Yes... And the only free client that manages ESXi is Windows only... No Mac love... Works great for me and I run the windows management console from a windows VM on the rare occasion I need to manage the server.

[G+_Adrian Jezierski]

The free version is VMware's esxi 4.1 hypervisor. It should run any Linux/Openbsd distro and windows server, up to 2008 r2. One just has to register themselves on the VMware site and and you should still be able to snag a license for 4.1.

[G+_Adrian Jezierski]

As of another note, VMware is kinda picky on hardware. The onboard NIC on my MB was not supported and had to order a couple of Intel's off eBay to get it up and running. ?

[G+_John Bhaktul]

I also would like to add - could you briefly cover numerous virtualization technologies - Xen, KVM, Microsoft's Hyper-V and maybe even cover a cloud infrastructure, i.e. OpenStack, Kudu project. Maybe even cover the trend to move to SaaS implementations so that you don't need to create a VM to host a website but just deploy the website to such a service that will host it and take care of all the storage, networking, etc.

[G+_Ben Tyger]

Adrian Jezierski I agree about the hardware pickiness of ESX(i). The ESXi OS (heavily modified redhat) is very hardware sensitive. NICs and storage controllers are the most common issues. Most of the supported  hardware is very server centric so supported hardware may not be readily available to a home user. If you have an office lab with old server class parts you are are probably OK. 

 

I run  a mix of ESXi and hyper-v at work. At home I run VirtualBox / PHPVirtualBox with a low overhead headless linux host.  

[G+_Henry Alexander]

What about microsoft offerings do they have any free tools?

[G+_Ben Tyger]

Henry Alexander I'm not exactly sure what you mean by tools. MS does offer a free bare-metal hyper-visor named Hyper-V Server 2012. It is a stripped down version of Windows with Hyper-V server installed on it. 

[G+_Henry Alexander]

Thanks ill take a look

[G+_John Mink]

I've had good experience with Oracle's Virtualbox.

[G+_Sam Patel]

I agree...this would be a great topic.  Right now I'm trying to setup a virtualization server..something more than just Oracle Virtualbox but rather something on bare metal.   I tried Proxmox but had lots of trouble with it.  It could have been the hardware or just me.  I think I'm going to try ESXi next.  I wonder how the others like Zenserver, Openstack, KVM etc. stack up.

[G+_John Mink]

I've been bad about watching Know How recently (forgive me Father?)   but have we still not covered this?