Hi guys, I've got my grubby mitts on a HP ML350 G5 server at work. Not the best server but it'll (hopefully) do exactly what I want. I've upgraded it to 16GiB ECC 667 and added a second Xeon 5310. So I now have two servers. One with an AMD 1090T, 8GiB 1333, 128GB SSD as OS drive and 3x2TB HDDs in RAID 5 which hold customer data (I work as a repair/build technician). Then I have the HP. The 1090T server used to hold customer data, was the primary DC for the workshop, be a WDS server and run Hyper-V (to make up to date WIMs for reloads). I initially split these roles so the 1090T had the domain and held customer data and the HP ran Hyper-V and WDS. Both ran Server 2012 R2 standard. I've been having issues with the HP dropping the 2nd CPU and not using it correctly. It also has dreadful performance on the E200i RAID controller (it has 4 72GB 10K SAS drives in R0). I'm wanting to move the HP onto Linux as it picks up and uses both processors (I tried a Linux Mint live disc). So to my questions I want the HP to do the virtualisation and hopefully WDS. So which version of Linux would you guys suggest? (I'm ok with Debian and Ubuntu distros, my favourite being Linux Mint. I also understand WDS is not the easiest of things to make work outside of Windows server). Also within that question, would taking the SAS drives out of hardware RAID and into software RAID make them any faster? If so would a different distro help with this? (Needs to do both in any case.) I think I'll be able to get WDS working by myself once the rest is set up however I need to be able to mount/image the virtual machines to distribute the resulting WIMs to Windows PCs. More questions Would moving the 1090T server (it doesn't need to be a domain controller, it can just hold files) to linux have any benefit? Would taking the 3x2TB out of hardware RAID5 onto software RAID add any benefits? (They're RAIDed using the onboard SATA controller on a M5A97 LE R2.0). Apologies for the wall of text, I would normally just try stuff out myself until I figured it out as it's more fun that way, but I unfortunately don't have the time for that. Any and all help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance Edit: Also which hypervisor would you use? I've used VirtualBox before but I wondered if something like Xen would give better performance?
Simply the best performance of any virtualisation product (without spending thousands) is vmware workstation on Windows. When running a VM in exclusive mode I don't know that I'm in a VM. I've tried esxi, and xen server, windows hyper-visor and virtual-box as well. They can all virtualize windows fine. If you want to virtualise anything else (linux) the GUIs end up being quite slow (cpu based rendering). Again it comes back to workstation on windows (or vmware player which is free for home use) for best all-round performance. I've had stability problems with Virtualbox and Workstation running on linux. However in my experience the best performer from a linux point of view was vmware workstation on Debian. I have a cheap AMD card and after installing the fglrx drivers for the card in Debian, Workstation seemed to enable 3d support allowing the graphics card to help out rendering the GUIs of the VMs. So they were good and responsive. This wasn't the case when using Ubuntu as the host O/S. Debian/Workstation was almost the perfect solution for me but alas there were stability issues. As always linux is a bit of a mixed bag. You might find some combo that works for you, but I wasn't happy with anything on offer. Generally either the GUIs were rendered really slowly or there was instability. The good news is, you can try everything out as its all free or you can get a trial for yourself and see what works for you. Windows Hyper-v is available on Windows 8 for free too.
Xen will do what you want. But it will take more configuration than ESXi though, which will give you nice pretty management interfaces. Xen, KVM or ESXi are what you are looking for i would say. I would suggest centOS if you go the KVM route, as Red Hat are very focused on KVM rather than Xen just now. If your going with Xen probably suggest openSUSE. I would stay clear of any of the desktop virtualization products as they are not built to run production machines. The hypervisors mentioned above interact with the hardware directly unlike Workstation or Virtualbox which have the overheads of dealing with the OS they are running on top of.
